Movie Review - Iron Man 3

So I went to see Iron Man 3 this past Sunday. Love it or hate it, pretty much everyone is talking about it, saying either it was the best of the trilogy, the worst, or just meh. Since everyone else has something to say about the movie, I thought that I'd get my two cents in. Now originally I'd planned to give my first thoughts, but I found that really hard to do. This movie just needed thought about, so I decided to take a couple of days and do just that.

Now first of all, I want to say I did like the movie. A lot. Next, I want to say spoilers. There will not be a huge amount of spoilers, but there will be some, so beware. Anything else I discuss here will already have been seen in the trailers, and don't worry, I'll warn you when the spoilers are coming.

I want to begin the review proper by getting a few things out of the way. While I am not able to read a majority of the Iron Man comics due to fiscal constraints, I do consider myself a pretty serious Iron Man fanboy. I just love the idea of a guy who can build his own superpowers, and something about the hall of armors is just so badass (I'm an action figure collector, so that might have something to do with my feelings on the subject). I read the lore, and I do my best to read the comics when I can. I understand the importance of the Mandarin to Iron Man's mythology (anyone who has seen the movie knows what this is a reference to). I also hate the Mandarin. Not in the "guy I love to hate" way, either, I just never liked him. The only version of the Mandarin I've liked at all is the version in the Armored Adventures cartoon series, and that version was a serious reinvention which wasn't very well received, too (again, those who've seen the movie know what this is about). So to put things as spoiler-free as I can (there will be more, spoilier stuff about this later), I didn't mind the reinvention of the Mandarin in IM3 at all, in fact I actually enjoyed it for the most part.

And now that all of that is out of the way, and most of you have rage-quit this review, I can continue unabashed, and I find that I'm not actually sure where to begin. I guess I'll start where the series started, with the first Iron Man movie. IM1 is a great movie, a better movie than IM3. It had the perfect mix of intelligence, action, and humor, it always knew when to apply humor, and when to be serious, the direction was good, it wasn't too over the top considering the source material. It was fantastic. This movie is almost as good, but it falls short in a couple of areas. First, this movie is sooo much more over the top. It goes very often from feeling like a comic book in live action to feeling like a Die Hard Movie. While the scenes are always impressive, you can't help but feel that some of the stunts would have been very out of place in either of the previous movies. While this isn't really a bad thing, it can be a little bit jarring whenever this movie refers back to the others at all. The change in directors doesn't help, either. Shane Black does a great job, but I couldn't help feeing several times that if Favreau were still behind the wheel, some of these scenes would have connected better.

I said, though, that this is a good movie, and as evidence of that, I want to point out that, while there are some other things that the viewer might find wrong with this movie, there is a lot more good than bad. The new characters who are introduced are strong, well-developed characters, particularly Aldrich Killian, the other villain of the movie, who succeeds in being a convincing anti-tony where Justin Hammer in IM2 largely failed. The recurring characters all get some amazing scenes, especially Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper, and Cheadle's Rhodes by the end. Even Jarvis got some fantastic scenes, comic and action (yeah, I said action). Not to mention the main man himself. Do I even need to praise Downey as Tony Stark at this point? The man becomes Tony in these movies, to the point that I don't even see Downey, I see Tony. Everyone was great. Well, almost everyone.

And this, kiddies, is where the review gets spoilertastic for awhile, because we gotta talk about the Mandarin in this movie, and I can't do that without spoilers. So last chance, skip to the last two paragraphs if you haven't seen this movie yet. You guys still here? No? Good, the rest of us can talk. So anyway, the Mandarin. At first the Mandarin is this badass terrorist, and fans of the character are thinking, wow, awesome upgrade. Then Tony finds him, and he turns out to be a fabrication, an actor hired by Killian to distract the public from the real culprit behind the terrorist acts, Killian's Advanced Idea Mechanics, or AIM. That's right, fanboys and fangirls, movie Mandarin is a bumbling British actor with ugly facial hair and a drug problem. Worst of all, Killian has the guy murdering people live in these terrorist message broadcasts, and this guy is dumb enough to believe that it's all smoke and mirrors, that he hasn't done anything wrong.

Yeah, so even though I don't mind this personally, I can totally see why people would have a problem.

Now, this doesn't mean a legit Mandarin can't exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You can spin that Killian, than man behind the man, is the true Mandarin, or you can even say to yourself, hey, maybe Killian used legends of a real man to create his character, so maybe the "real" Mandarin is still out there. Still, this is a strange twist. Not to say it isn't a great twist that has Killian coming off as extremely clever, but we've already got Thor in this continuity, so why can't we have a comic book Mandarin, too?

So really it depends on your personal opinions whether this is something wrong with the movie or not, but if you are one who believes that it is something wrong, it can really affect your opinion of the movie overall in a very negative way. A very very negative way, as the polarity of the fan base can attest. Overall, though, this movie is great. It has a lot more of Tony just being a cool super-genius like the first movie did, and the scene from the trailer where all of the suits show up at once is just as awesome as it sounds (I can't wait for the 3 3/4 inch action figures of those guys, squee!) Extremis, a cool piece of super science from the comics, is given an awesome conceptual upgrade in this movie which makes for some of the best fight scenes I've seen in recent memory. We even get to see some aftermath of the whole thing in the Avengers. It's smart, it's fun, it has a kickass after-credits cameo. It is almost as close to perfect as the first one was, If you can get over that one BIG thing.

So I guess the final question is, should you see this movie? Do I think you'll like it? Yeah, if you've seen the others, see it. As for if you'll like it, I have no clue. I liked it, though. I give Iron Man 3 a 9 out of 10.