REVIEW: Iron Man 3

Confession time: I've spent more time and words on this review than many of my college essays. My first draft of this was over 5 pages long. That's insane for a mediocre movie.

5/10 - It's really not very good.

Iron Man 3 was fast paced and enjoyable. It was a lot of fun to watch, something Iron Man 2 was completely missing, and it was very Tony Stark focused. All great things.

This is the biggest mess of a screenplay I've ever seen in action. It starts stories and drops them completely. It forgets about it's own plot and characters. The sentiment is vague and shallow. It has a ton of 80's action movie cliches and expects them to go over super seriously. That's what I get for watching a movie that starts with not one, but two different flashbacks.

WARNING: This is going to be incredibly spoilerific. I will ruin this movie if you haven't seen it.

The moment I turned against Iron Man 3 was after the first major action sequence when his house gets destroyed. There were small problems before, but this was infuriating. Tony Stark's house blows up, and he is presumed dead by the newspapers. Great, except.... Why didn't any of his 'super friends' come to help him? Even if none of the Avengers knew about the attack and no one could stop it, wouldn't Captain America get sent out to help stop the terrorist who already murdered a fellow Avengers? They mention the events of The Avengers every 20 seconds, you would think it was for a tie-in. What about Rhodes, why wasn't he protecting Tony? Furthermore, why didn't he care that Tony was pronounced dead? Tony call him up after "dying" and Rhodes says "Hey buddy, what's new?" Are you kidding me? This is not reality. There are no consequences to actions, this is nonsense.

Pepper Pots also had no purpose or clear story. Which is a shame because it started with such promise. An early moment has the Iron Man suit, on its own, attack Pepper. That's a beautiful setup for Pepper to fear the Iron Man suit and have a touching climactic moment where the suit can't save Pepper, only Tony can. This is particularly poignant after the whole second movie had Tony fighting a guy who created dangerous Iron Man drones. That would be stunningly cohesive. Too bad they fuck it up. Immediately Pepper wears the suit herself to save Tony during the house attack. Now we have a suit that anyone can wear, or can act independently. There are no longer any consequences for Iron Man, he is not fallible he is a pawn. Iron Man and Tony are no longer the same, the myth is over.

I'll restrain myself from nit picking with every single flaw but I'll say this, the whole third act is a disastrous mess. The bad guys have no motive or purpose. Is "Tony didn't give me enough attention when I was a kid" supposed to be motivation? That doesn't explain the totally random actions of the baddies. They just show up and make stupid decisions over and over with no end game or purpose. Maya Hansen shows up to warn Tony, but she also is working for Killian, even though he tried to blow her up. Sounds like a solid business plan to me.

My favorite is when they tie up the president to kill him on television, in the War Machine suit. In a functional suit! They're hanging this guy with some basic rope and they didn't just give him a knife to cut himself down, they gave him a suit with weapons and fire, that can fly him to safety. We know it's functional because ultimately that's what saves him! Did no one use their brains on this movie? How does a $200 million dollar movie make such stupid mistakes.

I really resent the 80's cliches that lead up to the final battle. I don't think lines like "We gotta make a decision. We can either save the President or Pepper. We can't do both." should make it past the first draft of a script, ever. (Spoiler alert: he tries to do both, with a sufficient amount of time to do both. He also fails at both. The President gets captured and Pepper gets infected? injected? whatever. Tony sucks.) There is whole bit about an airplane getting ripped open, and the passengers go flying out! 'Ahh we are losing cabin pressure! Someone save us!' This is so absurd considering The Avengers had an action sequence with Iron Man and Captain America trying to repair the outside of their flying craft, and none of those people went flying out into the sky because there was an open door. Audiences are not this stupid, please stop treating them as so.

By the end of this movie, there is absolutely nothing left to care about. Pepper was a damsel in distress who needed saving, and wasn't saved by Tony. She turned into an x-men mutant and wore the suit to save herself. Then she said the suits should be destroyed. Rhodes took back the Iron Patriot/War Machine suit which Tony immediately set to self destruct? Or not? I have no idea, but an accidental murdering of Rhodes would really improve this movie. Can someone explain why he blew up the suits by the way? The time to fear the drones was early on, especially after the fallout from Hammer. I don't think Pepper using the drones to save Tony twice would make her then turn around and say to ditch them. If anything she would finally sympathize. Weren't they having some sort of "marital miscommunication" at the beginning of this movie, too? What happened to that? Oh nothing. What happened to Happy? Nothing. What happened to Rhodes? Nothing. What happens in this movie? Nothing. Tony Stark is a nobody who has no character growth, makes random choices, screws up a lot, and could have solved everything if he kept his mouth shut and stayed in his basement.

IMDb - Iron Man 3 (7.5)
Wikipedia - Iron Man 3
Rotten Tomatoes - Iron Man 3 (78%)
Amazon.ca - Iron Man 3