“I want my Twenty Dollars back!”

“I want my Twenty Dollars back!”

In response to popular demand (No lie, people HAVE been asking me about this!)

My Review of Iron Man 3!

 

So a week ago I go on opening night to see the most anticipated movie of the year for me, Iron Man 3. I’ve been awaiting this one for a year. I was psyched, the previews looked fantastic! The action sequences looked awesome! This was going to be the BIG Movie of the year for me!

And the first half hour or 45 minutes of the flick lived up to that excitement, right up until Stark’s house got blown up. See, when that happened I fully expected Iron Man to swing into action and wreck helicopters with repulser rays, uni-beam blasts, and mighty fists. Instead I got a half functional suit of armor that after wrecking a couple of helicopters by hurling things at them, Iron Man/Stark flies off and disappears. I could even excuse and live with that, if it led to a great battle later.

He lands in Tennessee; somehow out of power, but wait, I thought the suit was powered by the arc reactor in his chest also keeping him alive? Huh? What? So how can the suit have run out of juice? That hasn’t happened in the comics since I think 1968!

Anyway Stark literally drags the armor to a garage that he breaks into, and then starts tinkering. Some kid shows up (Someone just explain to me why this kid with a sad story was important to the film, I’m trying to figure that out yet and Stark was basically a prick to him throughout the movie anyway.)  So Stark, sans armor is now doing this pseudo James Bond thing investigating a site where a bomb went off but it was really an extremis powered terrorist who blew himself up. Stark goes through another episode of shortness of breath and anxiety (PTSD supposedly dating back to the alien invasion of the Avengers movie.)

Meanwhile, Rhodey as ‘Iron Patriot’ (A douche name when compared with the mighty ‘War Machine’.) is running around the middle east looking for the Mandarin who has been making terrorist strikes in the U.S. as well as blowing up Tony’s house when Tony threatened him over another bombing he had caused that put Happy Hogan, Tony’s former chauffeur and now head of security in the hospital. Which brings us back to why Tony’s house was bombed in the first place by the helicopters sent by the Mandarin.

All of this sounds pretty good right? Except…THERE IS NO MANDARIN!!! The so-called Mandarin in this movie, Iron Man’s biggest and most powerful nemesis, a man who has almost conquered the world on several occasions throughout Iron Man’s fifty year history is, in this movie at least, an out of work British actor playing a role for a guy named Aldrich Killian, who is also the head of AIM, a villainous group of super-scientists in the comics who wear yellow bee-keeper-like suits. Here they just wore suits and ties and looked and acted like common thugs, unless they were Extremis powered, then they acted like super-powered thugs.

But wait, it gets better! So Rhodey somehow is captured, (Someone explain to me how his suit was depowered and him taken captive within it?) and Tony himself gets captured in a convoluted scene involving Maya Hansen an old flame of his who also happened to create the extremis formula or virus or whatever the hell it really is where we find out she’s really a bad girl and was working for AIM all along (Sorta paralleling recent events in the real Iron Man title.) Tony is taken captive along with Rhodey again, after they had broken out doing the pseudo James Bond thing once again, and we get a supposedly humorous and action packed moment with Tony flying around with one boot on and one glove that flew through the air at his mental command from the garage he had them stored in, in Tennessee. But again it is a half assed scene with Tony NOT in an Iron Man suit, just a couple of pieces of it.

After he is done here the rest of the suit arrives and he takes off in pursuit of the Iron Patriot suit which is now housing Aldrich Killian (I think) which is going after Air Force One and the President. Iron Man gets there in time to start battling extremis powered terrorists who were placed on the plane in disguise ( I think, again it was a week ago, so I just remember a mess of a scene.) Tony kills the main extremis terrorist who we’ve been watching this entire movie blow people up. Meanwhile the War Ma- Wait I mean Iron Patriot armor disappears as does the President. There is a huge hole blown in the side of the plane and people are flying out of it to their deaths. Tony flies out after them, and catches them all, making them all lock hands, before he releases them gently into a harbor somewhere. Why he couldn’t just fly to a nearby dock and let them down is beyond me. He’s Iron Man, he should have been able to catch the plane and fly it safely to the ground, if it hadn’t exploded already.

Now he lands on a bridge and is promptly hit by a truck, exploding into pieces. The camera pulls back from Stark’s view and it’s revealed he was controlling the armor with his telepresence unit remotely. Why? Why wasn’t he inside the armor flying it? There is no good reason given for this? And what kind of a piece of crap was it that a truck hitting it blows it apart?

Let’s step back and look at this, in the Avengers, Iron Man stood toe to toe with Thor, God of Thunder and traded blows with him. The armor did not fall apart then at all. But a truck hitting it turns it into scrap metal. Okay…

Stark and Rhodey make their way to a huge shipping dock where they fight to free Pepper who has now been infected with the extremis formula (Virus? Whatever?) and along the way Stark calls on all his suits of armor to come to his aid. They all fly in remotely, but all seem to be made of tinfoil as they continually fall apart when battling the extremis powered villains. Pepper supposedly falls to her death from about 200’ up, Stark dons suit after suit that is then wrecked by Killian who is the most powerful of the extremis enhanced terrorists in a pitched battle. Rhodey gets his ‘Iron Patriot Machine’ suit back and flies off with the president who they have succeeded in rescuing. Stark encases Killian in one of his armors and forces it to blow up, but Killian survives, seemingly with little damage and closes in for the kill against a totally defenseless Stark, but then… SUPRRISE! Pepper appears totally unscathed from her 200’ fall and punches out the bad guy, saving Stark’s life, Thank God for extremis girl! Oh wait that’s not politically correct, I have to call her extremis woman, or is it person? Then the big moment of the movie! Stark destroys all his armor at once in a fireworks display that would do the Grucci’s proud! Huh? What?

The wrap up is Stark figures out a way to remove the extremis bug from Pepper; the drunken ass of an actor who portrayed the Mandarin to the world is taken into custody. Tony finally figures out a way to remove the arc reactor from his own chest as well as the shrapnel threatening his heart. The final scene is him driving away from his destroyed home with one of his robotic helpers on a trailer as he throws the arc reactor that formally resided in his chest into the sea, proclaiming that he is Iron Man.

 

So let’s recap, Tony is having PTSD episodes throughout the movie, his armor is now made of foil as it keeps getting destroyed, he needs some twelve year olds help for the most annoying part of the film, his armor now needs to be charged on car batteries (No lie that’s what was hooked up to in in the garage he left it in.) Mandarin, his most powerful enemy, a guy who is on par with Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor is reduced to a joke, and Tony is almost killed if not for the intervention of his girlfriend who, oh thank God, saved his ass at the last minute, wearing a sports bra. Then in response to her mewling about his crazy life, he blows up every suit he had just to make her happy. So a guy who could save thousands of lives at any given moment because of his mighty suits of armor (Not in this movie, but, you know, previously) decides to give it all up to live happily ever after with his girlfriend.

I don’t know what this movie was. To me, it was a crap fest. There was two thirds of the movie with him as Stark, and the few scenes he had as Iron Man were shitty, hampered scenes with either weakened armor or were him just running around carrying people to safety. The mess at the end was ridiculous. If he had called the other suits there to fight alongside him against the extremis powered army I could have lived with that, but instead he kept getting the crap kicked out of him and had to change suits repeatedly.

But remember according to Shane Black, director of this disaster, we can’t have a Chinese person playing the Mandarin because it’s not politically correct and someone might get insulted. Really??? How about the millions of comic fans who were insulted by this poor excuse for an Iron Man film?

One star out of as many as you’d like, minimum five. As I said before, I want my $20 back.