Review, thoughts, etc. follow. Skip this post until you see it.
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First off, this is not Iron Man 3, no matter what the posters and the titles tell you. This is Iron Man 4, and the movie makes little sense without taking into account the actual third Iron Man movie, i.e. The Avengers.
To a big extent, this movie is about Tony Stark coming to grips with PTSD induced by saving the world from gods and aliens and almost dying on the other side of the universe after carrying a nuke through a wormhole and being unable to get the love of his life on the phone while doing it. He does exactly what you would expect – he spends his every waking minute building more suits, improving his armor, creating more options, and when I say every waking moment, I mean he’s not really sleeping much. And it’s taking exactly the toll one would expect on him. Take that as your premise, allow for the idea that this is the fourth movie in the series, think about Superman IV and reflect on how much worse it could all be, and let’s just ride from there.
I appreciate that they were trying to be subtle in how they reflected the events of New York. But they didn’t really give a good accounting of why War Machine, né Iron Patriot, was nowhere in sight at the time. You could infer from some early remarks (“there have been nine explosions, but the government only admits to three”) that Rhodey was all around the world chasing the Mandarin at the time, and thus not really an option. You could also infer that SHIELD is not affiliated with the American government at all, and since its mandate are those threats – extraterrestrial or otherwise – that ordinary forces can’t handle, it has no part in dealing with this particular brand of terrorist. After all, if the United States killed Osama bin Laden eventually, it stands to reason that you save the Avengers for when things are dropping out of the sky with lasers and shit. Iron Patriot is obviously being painted (literally) as a 21st Century Captain America, but SHIELD (and specifically Hawkeye, Black Widow and presumably Captain America) are not at the beck and call of Uncle Sam. I suspect a lot of people won’t infer that. But you’d think that the presumed death of Tony Stark would be of more than passing interest to Nick Fury; instead, this is the first time he doesn’t crop up in an Iron Man picture.
Still, set that aside. They could have gone a whole ‘nother way with Extremis – in the comics, Extremis was something that allowed Tony Stark to keep key components of the Iron Man suit inside himself. Hollows of the bones, or something. Instead, they kept it basic and made the suit do its thing with the cunning use of subcutaneous implants of the sort of wristband-thingys that the Mark VII suit relied on last time out. Okay, broadly feasible. Some of that seems to have trickled down to the other suits as well, because the whole “retract your way in and out of them more or less at will” seems to apply to several others, despite the pretense at the beginning that the Mark XLII represented a new step forward. And then there’s JARVIS remote-controlling the suits except when Tony is doing it himself…which doesn’t explain why the Iron Patriot armor (which doesn’t seem to have the JARVIS link) could then be used as a flying truck to stuff a kidnapped person in under the remote control of AIM or whoever. Setting aside the fact that the percentage power on each suit is purely a function of whatever the plot demands and is decidedly non-linear…
…hold it.
One of the things I found so annoying about Transformers was that Bay et al made such a big deal of the robots being exactly proportional, that this robot is made up of the same amount of parts and space and etc that the vehicle is. And yet, apparently an old VW Bug and a new Chevy Camaro are the same size. Or a robot that has to make the iconic noise while transforming can crouch completely silently behind a house. Or a huge cube that they had to hide by building Hoover Dam around it can suddenly be reduced to the size of a basketball.
There is a certain threshold of willing-suspension-of-disbelief that goes along with any movie. If you see When Harry Met Sally, for instance, you are able to suspend disbelief to the extent that you accept that Meg Ryan would ever find Billy Crystal attractive. If Carrie Fisher had ended the argument about the wagon-wheel table by telekinetically lifting it and smashing Bruno Kirby through the living room window with it…that would not have worked, because that’s beyond the accepted threshold of disbelief for that movie.
The problem with movies like this is that they have to play by their rules as they establish them. You want me to believe that there’s an all-powerful Force that binds the universe together and can be manipulated by those strong in it? Okay, your story, your rules. If in the fifth Star Wars movie, Anakin Skywalker could suddenly use the Force to teleport himself from Alderaan to Tattooine – nope. That’s beyond the threshold. To put it in terms even a kindergartener should understand, you can draw the lines wherever you like, but when you’re done, you have to color inside them.
When Bobby Petrino was fired at Arkansas after some extremely public malfeasance with a woman not his wife, culminating in a motorcycle wreck, one SEC coach anonymously said “You can get away with pushing the envelope if you’re winning, but my God, Bobby was wipin’ his ass with the envelope.” You can teeter right up to the line if you establish that it’s out there in the first place. The problem is, we have three movies establishing where the lines are for Iron Man, and by the last twenty minutes of the film I got the feeling Shane Black found himself without a roll of Charmin and started looking around.
And that’s where the other Transformers problem comes into play (actually there are three, but the third – needless additional subplots that ultimately have no bearing on the actual thrust of the movie – is thankfully not a factor here). The final battle is too damn crowded. Iron Man vs Iron Monger is manageable. The big final set piece in Iron Man 2 is straightforward enough. Even the Battle of New York in the Avengers is well-choreographed and easy enough to follow. What we end up with at the end of Iron Man 3 is a brawl on the docks, in the dark, with thirty flying suits that we can barely even see or make any sense of. Maybe some of the serious comic nerds will piece together one or another, but in the end, it’s just big, noisy, loud, messy, and tough to keep score on. It’s about what you’d expect from the man who dropped Lethal Weapon on an unsuspecting world, but the thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that we’ve come to expect a little better, slightly smarter grade of mayhem from its various denouments.
Other than that…it could be worse. There are some particularly good character swerves to keep people on their toes, and fans of the old comic book will be particularly surprised at the ultimate machinations of the Mandarin and confused by the ultimate disposition of the Ten Rings. That’s not a problem for me; it’s easy enough to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a separate self-contained canon (and one that heretofore has been expertly streamlined and simplified for mainstream consumption; these movies have done more to drive attention to those properties than Ultimate Marvel ever did). It’s nice to see our old friends together, and especially nice to see Tony and Rhodey in that sort of buddy-relationship we always knew had to be there but never got to see in the first two movies due to the basic conflict.
I need to see it again and see what I think. Ultimately I suppose I’m on board, but unless something clicks for me, it’s not the direction I would have taken.