The events of last summer’s record-breaking blockbuster The Avengers have left Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., in his fourth outing as the fan-favorite character) a broken man. Having narrowly defeated Loki’s wildly cosmic plan to summon aliens through a wormhole in New York City, he has lost sight of who he is. This depression, mixed with crippling post-traumatic stress disorder, have shaken him to his core and harmed the relationships with the people he holds most dear to him, including that of girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Enter the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a Middle Eastern terrorist capable of eluding the world’s intelligence agencies whose outlandish attacks force Tony Stark to suit up as Iron Man once again.
After the surprisingly well written/directed Avengers, Marvel succeeded in raising the bar quite high for themselves. Whatever followed next in their self-proclaimed “phase two” of films based on their characters would need to live up to the hype Avengers created. Iron Man 3 possesses not only all of the elements of a great follow-up to the superhero team-up, but also has the elements of a great conclusion to the Iron Man trilogy. Unfortunately, the film manages to completely corrupt all of these elements, and ultimately falls flat on its face.
The main problem of the film is the complete bastardization of the main villain, the Mandarin. What the casual moviegoer may not know is this character is the ultimate Iron Man villain. The Mandarin is to Iron Man what the Joker is to Batman. The dichotomy of their relationship is one of the more fascinating dualities in the Marvel Universe. As a lifelong comic book fan, imagine my anticipation when it was announced that not only would the Mandarin be brought to the big screen, but also would be closing out the Iron Man trilogy. To my shock, Marvel threw a complete curveball, and turned one of their most fascinating villains into a complete laughingstock.
I’m sure at this point I seem like the pretentious comic book guy from The Simpsons, so let me set the record straight. I am fine with writers/directors changing up characters for big-screen adaptations. In fact, I welcome the change. The problem with Iron Man 3 is that one look at any of the advertising for the movie points towards the Mandarin being the villain. It is obvious that Marvel wanted to trick the audience into believing this, and instead wrote in a second-act twist that only served to turn the rest of the film into a completely convoluted disaster.
When the Mandarin has been built up so much in the beginning of the film and in the advertising, you are naturally expecting some sort of payoff involving him later on. It’s such a jarring transition that you aren’t able to wrap your head around the elaborate and strange ‘Extremis’ plot the rest of the film revolves around. The plot just gets thicker and thicker, and, like the previous two Iron Man movies, you reach a point about three-fourths into the film where you simply give up on following it and decide to just try and enjoy the action scenes.
What I always find more frustrating than a simply terrible movie, is when a movie has all the elements of being fantastic, but throws them aside in favor of lazy writing and directing. This is regrettably the case in Iron Man 3. Marvel Studios had the opportunity to truly prove themselves, to show that they weren’t just a one-trick pony. Instead, they churned out another entry in a now-tired franchise, proving only that Iron Man might be getting a little rusty.
