Friday night Joy really wanted to watch Iron Man 3, and i did my best looking for tickets online. I wanted avoid standing in really long lines so i checked some of the nicer places where you can reserve seats but most were almost completely sold out. We resigned ourselves to catching it another night and went to watch G.I. Joe instead. When we got to the Rolling Hills AMC there weren’t that many there so we just decided to catch the next showing in 45 minutes.
Joy really enjoyed the movie but i had some reservation about the storyline. Personally i thought the movie was visually very cool, and interesting enough to keep me entertained, but in the end i don’t feel any need to watch it again. The movie ends up feeling like a 1970’s made for TV movie. It was pretty action packed from beginning to end (2 hours 10 minutes not counting previews) with not many slow parts for a pee break.
Spoilers from here on out.
I always look forward to the Marvel series of movie but often leave a bit disappointed in the direction that they always end up taking to try to make it relevant to current events or update characters to match the time period. Iron Man 3 follows that same trend and adds in a few things that i didn’t care for.
To start off the movie is a continuation of the Avengers movie, which of course starts Iron Man, but is completely unexplained in the movie assuming that you’ve already seen it and know what has already happened. Meaning that the movie doesn’t stand on its own if you haven’t seen any other movies. Tony Stark is back to being antisocial and spending all his time building different types of suits in the basement of his house.
The villain is supposedly this evil mastermind named the “Mandarin” who in the comic books, is a guy who grew up in China and is upset with the government after it seizes his family’s house and what not. After study all sorts of martial art forms he finds these 10 alien rings that allow him to wield 10 different powers and is one of Iron Man’s greatest enemies.
In this movie he Mandarin is built up to be a super angry mastermind blowing up all sorts of things and is trying to prove the United States is in the wrong for helping out Big Oil. Too bad he ends up being a british actor being used as a prop for Aldrich Killian who’s basically mad at Tony Stark for leaving him up on a roof of a hotel so that he can sleep with scientist Maya Hansen. Tony of course ditches her the next morning so those two end up teaming up to work on a formula to regenerate the human body (Extremis).
So now the movie ends up a bunch of ex-military pumped up on Extremis battling a bunch of empty iron man suits being controlled by Tony Stark’s computer butler JARVIS. Basically the same but opposite plot for Iron Man 2, where Ivan Vanko builds a bunch of empty Iron Man clones to destroy Tony Stark. meh.
Other things that i couldn’t stop complaining about were:
James Rhodes is back in the Iron Patriot (War Machine), but when he suits up he’s wearing a f’ing Fred Perry polo shirt when he suits up and goes across the world to find Mandarin.
Maya Hansen goes from a character who you feel bad for, to someone you get angry about, and then at the end just think she’s stupid. I know she wants his help to fix her formula, but why didn’t she just go ask him rather than try to have him kill him. Then after they find him alive, Killian’s men captures him and try to force him to fix her formula. Eventually she just gets shots by Killian because she’s wavering and now has Tony Stark captured so he can fix a formula he’s never studied.
The plot for the movie is that the Vice President’s daughter/niece/some young girl has no legs and obviously wants Extermis so that she can grow back her legs and live a normal life, but they explain that pot point for maybe 4 seconds of screen time. The Vice President needs to kill the president because …. i have no idea, why didn’t he have Killian give it to her?
The final straw was that Pepper Pots gets captured and injected with the Extermis, and after becomes self healing ends up saving Tony Stark from Killian in just her sports bra, after apparently burning to death. I didn’t know that Extremis could recreate clothes as well.
