Iron Man 3 review

SPOILERS. Guys, there are going to be spoilers here. I don't want to spoil comics for people (I do anyway, hoping that people won't be too mad) but I really don't want to spoil a major motion picture. DO NOT read this review unless you have no desire to see the movie, have already seen the movie, or do not care about spoilers. On with the show.

There's a real flaw with my vocabulary that extends beyond my inability to think of words to describe comics aside from "interesting." That flaw is the term "comic book villain." When I say it, I think of a villain who is over-the-top evil and seemingly evil for evil's sake. I also know that if other people used that term, I'd be mad because plenty of comic book villains have nuances and real backstory and history and a trajectory on their arc that got them to where they are. In many cases (not all of them) the ones who ARE evil for the sake of evil are still done well enough to make them compelling enough to watch. They have motivations. Iron Man 3 has two villains that eventually, thanks to a twist in the movie, becomes one villain. For about half of the movie we have a terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) bombing locations in America with impossible to trace bombs the put out an absurd amount of heat, vaporizing anyone within a few feet of the explosion. Mandarin interrupts all broadcasts and claims responsibility, promising more bombings in time. Not to any end, just to "teach America a lesson." Working under him is Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), creator of a think tank called Advanced Ideas in Mechanics, or AIM. Killian had tried to get Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., of course) onboard back in 1999 but Tony had ignored him. Tony's date for the night though, a biologist named Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), apparently took Killian up on the offer, bringing her invention of a way to recode DNA to heal a person, among other things, over to AIM. We eventually find that Killian is, in fact, not working under the Mandarin but directing things himself and that the Mandarin is a construct, with Kingsley actually playing an actor playing the Mandarin on these broadcasts. It's a twist that will throw off most moviegoers and most comic fans, as the Mandarin is a long time real enemy of Stark in the comics. Killian is behind it all, spreading Hansen's data, called Extremis, I'm not sure there's a huge point to the twist other than being a twist though. This might just be from me as a fan of the comics (though I've been told from non-comic readers this was true) but I feel like we knew Killian was a bad guy all along and we even see him working with the Mandarin before knowing that the Mandarin is fake. So if it's a minor twist, at least we have one solid villain instead of several weaker villains who don't get enough screen time to develop.

Guys, that line was meant to make you think that would be true, but it's not true. Aldrich Killian is a comic book villain. He created the Mandarin so that he has a face to hide behind and a lightning rod for hatred. So what is Killian's end game in all this, now that he has the pieces moved into place? I don't know. I mean, he wants power, I guess. He strings the vice president into his plans which, assuming his last bombing wherein the president would be killed goes off without a hitch, would put an AIM supporter in the White House. He mentions that he controls the war on terror with the west's biggest hitter and its biggest terrorist in his hands. So is he in this for the power? For the money? He seems pretty wealthy already. I didn't get the sense in either of my two viewings over the weekend that he particularly cared about money. There's a little subplot with him in love with Pepper and using her as a trophy that seems a little sudden. Simply put, he seems evil for evil's sake, but without the race hatred of a Red Skull or the power and ego of a Doctor Doom. This might seem like picking on just one aspect of a long movie but it's kind of a make-or-break point. A villain without a sincere motivation is just confusing because there are no terms on the table. I think the film tries to set up the idea of Killian as a once-good guy, back in 1999 when he was a nerd hanger-on with physical deformities, who has been slighted one too many times and snapped, but it doesn't stick. The same is kind of true for Hansen, though we see more of her before and after and she gives us a speech about science meant for good being used for evil. Still, there isn't enough time spent on developing these characters to give us a real sense of why they're doing what they're doing. Hansen is definitely better, showing a woman who is doing important research and will do whatever it takes to get it funded, but she also comes away as someone who has seemingly accepted the Mandarin solution and only thinks better of it later.

Yikes. We've gone two long paragraphs without even touching the titular character. Let's talk about the good first because those paragraphs were definitely huge negatives. The action scenes are intense and fun to watch (if at times a little cluttered and confusing). The film never feels really painful to watch, which seems like a backhanded compliment but really isn't; there are plenty of superhero movies (and movies in general) that don't just drag, they actively seem to resent the viewer. Tony is Tony, suave and cool but able to recognize, eventually the good things in his life. It will never not be fun to watch an Iron Man suit fly through the air and in this movie we get a whole slew of them doing just that. The performances are largely what we would have expected out of the talented group of actors. The film also did a great job of keeping to itself, not reaching out to the Avengers in an attempt at pleasing fans (except in a cute post-credit scene). That can't be easy to do in a time where The Avengers made over a billion dollars.

So let's move on. My biggest flaw with Tony is that there's a plot surrounding his time in The Avengers. Tony has come away from the experience a different person. No matter how cool he seems on the outside, he's torn apart inside trying to cope with things that are bigger than him when, before The Avengers, nothing had really BEEN bigger than him. He knows aliens exist, he knows a little about Thor's nine realms, he knows that there's a guy who can fly and call lightning, and he's the only one on Earth who saw what he saw beyond the portal. Tony's now prone to anxiety attacks and hasn't slept soundly since the events in New York. It's explained as how he has so many new suits; he's spent all of his free time (which is considerable now that he doesn't sleep) building new suits and inventing new tech for his new suits. His newest tech is an ability to call his suit to him at a moment's notice, or to throw it on someone else (like Pepper to get her out of the way of debris). But anyway, the idea of his anxiety attacks is an extremely interesting one. It's easy to forget, given the scale of the movies and the fact that the audience has seen all the Marvel movies and is no stranger to Thor nor to sci-fi as a whole, that Tony Stark wouldn't be comfortable with these things appearing in his world. The anxiety attacks fit well with the character and the problems behind them are real ones that are fascinating to unravel. Then, halfway through the movie, the plot drops out to make way for action scenes.

I'll say again, the action is good if a bit dragged out, but when you set up your main character to have a hugely interesting new flaw then kill it with no resolution and no apparent memory that it was a problem (except for a throwaway line later about how he's sleeping better), you've got a problem in your storytelling. Tony's anxiety attacks, which had played a major role in the first half of the movie, all but disappear when he's told by supporting character Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins), a precocious child with a scientific mind and no father, to go build something. Did...did that solve the problem? Because, from Tony's own testimony and as evidenced by all of the Iron Man suits, he's been building things. Then the anxiety never reappears because we have action scenes to get to. So we take a really interesting and new idea of a character who has always been in control and has understood what he's been doing losing a grip on that control and that reality before completely forgetting we did that and watching Tony and his army of Iron Men attacking an army of Extremis powered soldiers (quick side note: Extremis isn't particularly well-explained either. It "rewires" DNA for the next step in evolution and that MIGHT mean that it makes people able to heal, makes them run faster, makes them stronger, makes them hot to the touch, and so on. But all of that is shown, not told, so who knows what this thing really does?) while trying to save the love interest only to find the love interest saving him. TWIST.

I love Marvel movies. I think that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been unprecedented in its boldness and its willingness to tie together this huge web of movies and characters, despite legal flaws like "you can't use Spider-Man or mutants." I think The Avengers was a pretty near perfect film for what it set out to do and I've been impressed by the depth of story and character each film has put forth when it would have been so easy to just make a popcorn flick. I think Iron Man 3 is a popcorn flick. It's got good action, quippy characters that we know and love, and a rather undefinable antagonist and plot. I think it's the weakest entry from Marvel since Iron Man set the whole universe in motion. On the plus side, the Iron Man franchise as a whole never reached Spider-Man 3 or X-Men the Last Stand depths. The movie is still totally watchable and never gets painful to watch. I like the introduction of both AIM and Roxxon to the MCU. Hopefully it's not a sign so early on into Marvel's Phase II that the direction from here on out is going to be coasting. I still have high hopes for Thor: The Dark World and remarkably high hopes for Captain America: Winter Soldier. For the first time seeing a new Marvel movie though, I can honestly say I'm not dying to see Iron Man 3 again.