Iron Man 3 Review (Spoilers)

Iron Man is back and it's bigger, louder, and more expensive than ever; but definitely not better than ever. 

Robert Downey Jr. reprises his role as millionaire Tony Stark/Iron Man. The film takes place after the events that occurred in The Avengers. We see a very distraught and vulnerable Tony Stark, a condition we've never really seen him in when he is not trapped in a cave. All of the original cast is back for Iron Man's third installment. Gwyneth Paltrow reprises her role as Pepper Potts, Don Cheadle reprises his role as War Machine, and even Jon Favreau is back as Happy Hogan, despite Marvel firing Jon after the failure of the second installment. 

Which leads me to my first point about this movie. It is very different compared to the first two. Tony is still more wise-cracking and ridiculous than ever, but the tone of the film is undeniably different from the first two. Iron Man 3 feels much darker, and a lot more serious. Shane Black, writer of the Lethal Weapon movies and director of the Robert Downey Jr. film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, directs and co-writes this film and you can tell there is a change in management. Jon Favreau did an incredible job directing the first Iron Man but really dropped the ball with the ridiculous, pointless sequel. At first I was glad that they were bringing in some new blood. I thought that was a good decision to give the franchise the boost it needed to prevent mediocrity. Unfortunately, I was very, VERY wrong. A few days before I saw Iron Man 3, I read an interview Shane did for some magazine. In the interview, he stated that wanted to make this Iron Man more realistic and relatable to today's society. When I first read that I thought to myself "Oh, that's actually really cool. They are going to make the Iron Man franchise a little bit more like the Dark Knight series by making it more realistic." Then I went into the movie and about an hour in, I knew what he really meant. (and this is were the spoilers begin). I enjoy Ben Kingsley. He is a great actor and I was really excited to see him in a superhero movie playing what seemed to be a great villain. Only one small little thing, he isn't even a villian! Half way through the movie, we find out the the Mandarin, a bad guy who seemed so great and mysterious and awesome, was just an actor paid by Guy Pearce's character, who was actually the Mandarin. 

First off, that is an incredibly ridiculous twist. The Mandarin is an iconic Iron Man villain, and to make his whole character just some cover for a bigger (and may I add, idiotic) conspiracy is just abismal and really messes with the source material. I get what Mr. Black was trying to do, he was trying to convey that in today's society the real bad guys are the men behind a curtain pulling strings or something like that. Now, I might not be so infuriated at this twist if Guy Pearce's character was at all interesting, but he wasn't interesting! He was just your average, cliched villain whose motives and reasoning were cartoonish and ridiculous. And he breathes fire! It seemed like after that reveal, the whole movie went down hill. One of the biggest sub-plots of this movie is that Tony accidentally flies to some town far away from his home with a broken Iron Man suit. It was really great to see Tony have to use his brains to try to fix the suit and see that vulnerability. Personally, that whole middle part was easily the most entertaining things in the movie. Yet, at the obligatory and gratuitous fight scene ending, it turns out that Tony Stark actually has a big compartment in the ground of his home not filled with one Iron Man suit, not 2, not even 3, but 100 Iron Men! First off, that completely negates my favorite moment of the whole movie. He didn't even need to fix that one broken down suit because he had 100 back home! It just didn't seem right to me, and really kept me distracted while watching that pointless fight scene ending. Overall, the first half of Iron Man 3 is good, really good, but once the Mandarin twist kicks in, the quality cascades. The ending felt rushed, the characters didn't really seem that interesting, but Tony Stark is his comedic self and that is usually fun to watch. The action scenes are impressive, the story shows a vulnerable side to Tony that we haven't seen in a while. It was a decent installment, nowhere near is good as the first one, but much better than number two. Overall Rating- B