Iron Man 3

Let’s get one thing out of the way to begin with.  I love Marvel.  I love all Marvel movies.  I haven’t seen a single Marvel film that I didn’t enjoy.  In terms of entertainment and story telling they tick all the boxes that a good film needs to tick.

The first time I saw Iron Man 3, I wasn’t that impressed.  I enjoyed it, but I felt it was one of the weaker Avengers films out there.  For me, the best non Avengers, Avengers films have been Iron Man 1 and Captain America 1.  Certain plot developments in this film really annoyed me.  I have just watched it for the second time and I kind of want to re-asses my original thoughts however.

Once again, it is a film set in a larger story and so, whilst it has to be good in it’s own right, it also has to be assessed based on its contribution to the larger story.  And now, given what we expect the plot of Avengers 2 to be, Iron Man 3 is actually a really well done lead up to that.  I’ll say no more right now, but I expect that when you watch Iron Man 3 in view of Avengers 2, you’ll be forced to conclude the same thing.

Second time round, I really enjoyed this film.  Because I knew that the thing that was going to annoy me was coming, I was de-sensitised to it and so it didn’t annoy me this time around (there is actually some irony involved here but more on that later).  Given that, I found the film as a whole to be really good and actually quite brave for Marvel.  Iron Man isn’t really the hero, Tony Stark is.  We meet him in a bit of a post New York/Avengers melt down and so he is really struggling as a person, and as a super hero.  Actually, he spends most of the film, being the hero without the help of his suit of armour, thus answering the question of Captain America from Avengers.  “Big man in a suit of armour.  Take that away and what are you?”  The answer is an emphatic, ‘I am Iron Man’, given at the end of the film.  We see that Tony is in fact the hero even when he’s not wearing his suit.  In terms of entertainment, the House Party at the end is edge of the seat excitement stuff as we see all the Iron Man armours working autonomously to defeat the villains of the story.  So we are left with a question, if the armours can do it on their own, do we need Mr Stark at all?

Onto the villain and the irony.  The main villain in the trailers was billed as the Mandarin.  Bit of a spoiler here so look away now if you don’t want to see!

 

According to Marvel, the Mandarin is a villain that it is hard to do well in live action so they decided to make him an actor playing part to conceal the real villain.  So there is no real Mandarin.  The irony being that way he was presented before the ‘revelation’ actually worked really well and could easily have carried the grand villain of the film.  That title actually fell to Aldrich Killian.  Obviously not guy in a suit like no’s 1 & 2 but this time a genetically modified guy who melts stuff and breathes fire.  The trouble is, he just isn’t as good as the villain the Mandarin was before he was revealed as an actor.  And that is the annoyance of the film for me.

On second viewing, this wasn’t so bad and you can actually begin to see how he works as a villain.  He’s not bad actually as he is so different to Iron Man.  I still can’t really work out what he wanted though, what his grand plan was.  That for me is a bit of a shame.  But given that the pattern for the 2nd phase Marvel villains is that they are just there to keep things a bit exciting whilst the bigger story is developed I’ll overlook this for now. 

Overall this is a reasonable Marvel film.  It’s Marvel, so it is good but it isn’t one of the best Marvel films.  It’s entertaining.  It’s a good story, which I think will make a lot more sense after Avengers 2 is seen and it mostly well done, save the Mandarin annoyance.

I’m giving it 75/100.  If they’d stuck with the Mandarin as the villain it might have hit the high 80s.