Iron Man 3 – The Mini Review

I’m taking a break from reviewing (and occasionally tweaking) nearly 400 photos I took last night of my fellow members of the Perth Allied Costumers to make a blog post about Iron Man 3... I don’t know yet but this might get a little spoilerish, so I’ll start with a big warning.
 

POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!

(if you find anything that spoils the movie after reading this, on your head be it)

I’ll start by saying that I absolutely freaking loved this film. I thought the first Iron Man was absolutely amazing, it rekindled an interest in old shell head that laid dormant for so long (mostly due to some of the most absolutely terrible writing for so long) and it took what was a relatively obscure hero outside of the comic book realm and thrust him into a pop-culture icon on par with Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. Sadly the second movie just wasn’t quite up there in story wise as the first, although it was still an enjoyable ride just not worth rewatching for the most part.

Shane Black did what needed to be done to the character to make him a worthy hero, especially in the aftermath of The Avengers, and stripped the character down to (almost) nothing and forced Tony to use his incredible intelligence to overcome everything put in his way. Whilst some of it was indeed predictable in that Hollywood way, it was that great left turns in the narrative which made the journey so enjoyable to get there and is also indeed a great source of the humour in this movie.

I suppose looking back what is kinda disappointing in a lot of the other movies is that Tony doesn’t get a chance to use his brain as much as he does in this movie. After developing the first suit in a cave... WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS, Tony pretty much has an almost unlimited amount of resource and zero pressure into all the further problem solving. Realistically the only time he even uses his brain in the fight against Iron Monger was goading him into freezing the suit at high altitude, but beyond that it was essentially a slug fest. Again when he is versus Whiplash the only way they defeated him was by the combined power of his and War Machine’s Omni-beams... not a truly intellectual solution. Although the ending is yet another slugfest, there was enough throughout that you get a good sense of just how smart Tony is and how well he can think in a pinch.

The only real spoilerish thing I want to talk about is what they did with The Mandarin. If you ignored my spoiler warning and don’t want to know what happened then there is no hope you. Okay, I was a tad sceptical over Ben Kingsley playing The Mandarin. Not that I don’t think he’s a good actor but more I’m getting slightly annoyed at this whole “Ben Kingsley plays *insert ethnicity here* villain” and it is getting a bit tiresome (see Thunderbirds and Bloodrayne... in fact don’t see Bloodrayne... ever). However when it is revealed that *SPOILERS!!!!* Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin is the patsy I had to pay kudos to Black for such an incredible twist that probably has M Night Shyamalan changing his underwear. I was looking forward on how they were going to pull off a Mandarin/Iron Man fight and I wasn’t disappointed to find that this was simply not going to happen... well not in the way we thought it would.

Just had a thought then when I was wrapping this puppy up, the whole “Bad guy takes all the resources away from the hero” schtick already occurred in the Dark Knight Rises, okay it wasn’t exactly played out the same way but I think it worked a lot better in IM3. One of the things that really bugged me about how Bane stole all of Bruce Wayne’s money in DKR is that it would have been easy for Wayne to turn around and say “Hey, remember when there is that big hold-up at the stock exchange and someone was hacking the system, isn’t that the exact same time when someone used my account to purchase all those stocks? And whilst you’re at it, check the CCTV footage I don’t think that I was there to use my thumb print to access... WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE!!! If it was so important to steal Wayne’s thumbprint, then why the fuck did they need to hack the system! If they have hackers capable enough of hacking a secure system like that when they could have easily bypassed the... you know what I’m sick of thinking about the plot holes in that bloody film.

There was some great solid performances from all in the show, and naturally RDJ (as all the cools kids call him) completely holds the whole thing together and I know his performance won’t be considered for a major award because he’s performing in some pissy little action film, but damn it he deserves it.

Well that went on longer then I wanted it too, now back to the rest of the 400 photos.