Iron Man 3 SPOILER Review

Final warning: this review has spoilers for Iron Man 3.  If you haven't seen it yet and are intending to, hold off on reading this.

One of the things that bothered me in the first hour was how little we saw of The Mandarin, played by Ben Kingsley.  That in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing; Heath Ledger’s Joker isn’t on screen for a lot of The Dark Knight, but his presence is felt throughout because his scenes, especially early on, are so powerful.  Not so much with The Mandarin, who doesn’t do a whole lot.  It isn’t until later that we understand his absence was setting up a plot twist; a horrible, horrible plot twist.

The twist, wherein The Mandarin is revealed to be some drunken actor playing patsy to the real villain Killian, is a slap in the face for Iron Man fans.  For fans of Iron Man, The Mandarin is his archenemy, so finally seeing him on the big screen was a big deal.  Fans waited two movies for this, and boy was this not the way to pay off that wait.  Could you imagine if they held off on The Joker for two Batman movies and had him turn out to be some figment of Batman’s imagination?  It’d almost make fans yearn for Schumacher.

For starters, barely featuring The Mandarin up to that point makes it hard to feel any menace or conflict.  It also is completely inconsistent.  After the twist, the movie conveniently ignores the fact that Trevor, as “The Mandarin”, straight up murdered someone.  I don’t care how loaded he’s supposed to be, how can anyone with half a brain not figure out they’re being played at this point?  Then it completely removes all the stakes of The Mandarin being a serious threat since it’s just a cover for Killian’s Underpants Gnomes.  If you want to see this type of twist done right, rewatch Batman Begins instead.  A good twist raises the stakes and changes the trajectory of the story.  This takes it into territory that doesn’t work.  Having Obidiah Stane selling weapons in Iron Man worked.  Taking a supposedly menacing figure and making him an unknowing Oz doesn’t.  The only way this twist could work is if Iron Man 3 was a pure comedy, and while it has more humor than the previous installments, I wouldn’t call it that.

Later on Killian claims he’s The Mandarin and has been all along.  OK, movie, explain this.  You have this character of Chinese origin from the comic books.  In the film you portray the fake one like a generic Middle Eastern terrorist, then have some white guy claim he was him without ever bother going into explaining why he’d ever call himself “The Mandarin”.  Is he a fan of oranges?  Also, what exactly is going on with Killian’s character in this film?  He begins the movie looking slightly more subtle than a nerd from an 80s movie, then we see him 13 years later and he’s all evil because...he got stood up on New Year’s and nanobots or whatever.  Killian seems like a character they could’ve used in the previous films as a build up to this one like Raimi tried to do with The Lizard before his Spider-Man franchise imploded.

And why did Tony Stark wait until the end of the movie to remember he had a whole arsenal of suits ready to go?  It seems like he struggled for no reason.  Am I forgetting something?

To be fair, not everything is as poorly handled.  Pepper Potts, although she ends up getting kidnapped, continues to be a step in the right direction for female characters in comic book movies, which sadly tends to make them constantly imperiled and in need of being saved.  Also having the hero hang out with a little kid in a transparent way to pander to its young audience isn’t annoying, but the kid’s storyline is underdeveloped like a lot of subplots.  I also liked seeing Don Cheadle as the Iron Patriot/Rhodes, though his character is missing from most of the first half.

But that ties into my central problem with this film: there’s far too much going on and not nearly enough time devoted to it to make any impact.  This is a problem that’s sunk many a superhero franchise, and it’d be a shame if it happened to this one.  Obviously the end is designed to wrap this up as a trilogy, with Tony destroying his suits, getting the shrapnel removed (again, why wait so long?) and heading out for his future.  They’ve said we won’t see Iron Man again until The Avengers 2, so any possible sequel to this will be at least 3 years down the road.  I hope they can take the time off to craft a good comeback.  Iron Man 3 has been getting good reviews and certainly the box office is ensuring we’ll be seeing plenty more, but I don’t want it to get to the point where we’re all Banner in the epilogue.

Random bits:

Stan Lee was a judge at a beauty pageant, another odd bit since the pageant itself didn’t really add anything to the proceedings.  But it’s still nice to see Stan.

Nice to see Shaun Toub’s Yinsen have a cameo tying it back to the first film

No AC/DC?  Minor let down