"Iron Man 3" - Film Review

Iron Man 3 has the weird task of balancing the long term goals of a serialized narrative and telling a stand-alone story. And in the process of carrying the weight of the pre-existing long term narrative (a la The Avengers) and being its own isolated story, it finds itself between a rock and a hard place it never fully overcomes.

The film is a fun, action-packed time that’s on the whole very entertaining, but it somehow always seems to fall short of being fully satisfying. The film muddles around in its narrative for the first act, seemingly uncertain as to what the heck it wants to be. There’s a voiceover by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) foretelling of future events, but the film never lives up to the claim of how awesome and dark these events are supposed to be. By the time it does settle on the direction of its plot, about a third of the way through, the action picks up and remains to be rather exciting and well-executed; and the action largely cover for a lot of the film’s sins.

The film is stronger than Iron Man 2 (which also muddled around trying to service too many needs for the individual franchise and Marvel films as a whole). There is a fairly straightforward story that the film follows through on (it even has a few genuinely interesting twists, particularly one involving the villain the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley, being delightfully hammy)). But the film is never as crackerjackin’ of a good time as The Avengers ultimately was, and the film inevitably lives in the shadow of that film.

Downey Jr. remains to be incredibly charismatic and strong as Tony Stark. But some of the choices with the character are never well-realized. Tony has anxiety attacks over the memories of the events from The Avengers but it’s never very well explained or well handled, and Downey Jr.’s performance is mainly what sells this change in character.    

All the supporting characters are similarly interesting but also often rather underutilized. Gwyneth Paltrow is still great at making Pepper Potts absolutely Stark’s equal, but at times she seems to be part of the story solely for Tony to have someone to save. Don Cheadle is a great actor but War Machine almost seems to be here at this point for (comic book) fan service. Guy Pierce is despicably slimy as Aldrich Killian and it’s an inspired bit of casting, but he’s put into a role of limited villainy.

Iron Man 3 has some great action sequences and the always winning performance of Downey Jr., but it may just leave you a little disappointed. 

Grade: B-