I'm going to spell this out just in case the title didn't give it away, but THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT IRON MAN 3!
Obligatory warning out of the way, what did I think of the film? Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I'll get on to why in a minute, but I'll start with a roundup of the things I liked about it. In no particular order:
Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin
Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, the Mandarin's corporate backer
Robert Downey Jr as himself
Gwyneth Paltrow kicking ass!
Some badass action sequences
Tony Stark dealing with anxiety attacks in the wake of the events of the Avengers
ALL OF THE ARMOUR!
There were a few things that really got to me about the film though, and not just the fact that AC/DC weren't heard for the duration (I mean, even Avengers used them to play in Iron Man). I'm going to start with Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin, and this is where the first MAJOR SPOILER comes in. If you haven't got the hint by now, you're never going to, so here goes.
I went to the film expecting to see the Mandarin as someone who could face off against Iron Man, or at least outwit him, but the big reveal of the film was that Ben Kingsley's character was just some drunk actor hired by Guy Pearce to play "The Mandarin" in order to cover up some malfunctioning Extremis tech and instigate a war on terror for profit. Words cannot express how gutted I was by this, but I'm going to try. I grew up watching the Iron Man cartoons on TV. This was my first experience of the character (I never really read comics as a kid), and his main nemesis in the cartoons was The Mandarin, a supervillain possessed of ten magical rings that together gave him the power to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted. He was a total badass, but usually tended to use his intellect against Iron Man rather than tackling him head on. It made the show great to watch. So, when I heard they were bringing in the Mandarin as the villain for Iron Man 3 I got very excited. I never expected them to go down the full-on magic rings route, but I did think the Mandarin would be the central villain of the film, and I did expect him to be more than a match for Stark. For this reason, the big reveal of the film, where the Mandarin enters in his underwear to the sound of a toilet flushing and proceeds to be cowed into submission by Stark brandishing a gun, was almost painful to watch. I was expecting almost the whole way through the film for the Mandarin to reveal he'd just been playing Stark by putting on a fake British accent, and that he'd been two steps ahead of our hero all along. That's the Mandarin I remember - a genuinely threatening character, not some washed-up actor. The other reason this really disappoints me is that this means we will most likely never see the Mandarin in the Marvel movie universe.
Another big source of disappointment for me was the way the film ended. Stark blows up all his suits, gets the girl, fixes everything (including the shrapnel in his heart) and delivers a cosy little monologue about how his life is all better now and how he's a changed man. The tone is very much that he's hanging up his armour for good. If Iron Man was a separate franchise from the rest of the Marvel movieverse that's probably how they would have left the ending, and the film would have been better for it, but then they had to throw in the final line, "I am Iron Man". It just didn't fit with the rest of Stark's closing speech, and felt very much like it had been tacked on the end to leave the way open for Avengers 2. While I love watching the Marvel films, I think they were trying too hard to mimic the superhero trilogy masterclass illustrated by Christopher Nolan's Batman films, forgetting that at the end of that trilogy the hero bows out gracefully. While in real life, anyone in that position would doubtless pack it in after all that he's been through, Iron Man was never meant to have the gritty realism of the Dark Knight films - Tony Stark is too much larger-than-life, especially when Downey Jr's playing him.
And then there was the therapy - the post-credits sequence that revealed that Stark's narration of the film was actually him offloading to his lab buddy Bruce Banner, showing that the entire film was just an extended flashback. While I can understand that even Stark might have decided to get a little therapy after his anxiety attacks, a better way to show this would have been to show him talking to a character we haven't seen before. Especially in a post-credits sequence, they should be starting to drop hints about the next Avengers movie. Even if they decide not to go through with whatever they allude to, a subtle character placement would have kept the fans talking for months. Instead all we have is that Banner's going a bit grey and seems to have put on weight. The sequence was a huge missed opportunity.
Overall, I felt the film spent too much time looking back (as trilogy final-parters are prone to do) and too little time looking forward (as intermediate installments in film series are supposed to do). The music was just slightly wrong (because there was no AC/DC), Stark's suit never worked properly and I'm going to be pissed at Marvel for some time over what they did to the Mandarin.
I know a few people so far who've seen the film and loved it. I get why - there were a lot of good things about it - but for my money it could have been so much better.
