Iron Man 3: A Good Film with a Great Middle and a Serviceable End

Shane Black took over the Iron Man series from Jon Favreau and made a film about a man hiding in a basement, building things that do not work. Iron Man 3 is the seventh film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a sequel to Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010), and it runs 130 minutes. Robert Downey Jr. returns as Tony Stark. The tagline promises power behind the armor. The film is more interested in what happens when the armor runs out.

Trailer, via Marvel Entertainment.

A Party in 1999 Sets Everything Moving

The film opens thirteen years before its main action, at a New Year’s Eve party where Stark meets Maya Hansen, played by Rebecca Hall. Hansen invented Extremis, an experimental regenerative treatment that lets patients recover from crippling injuries. A disabled scientist named Aldrich Killian, played by Guy Pearce, offers Stark and Hansen a place in his company, Advanced Idea Mechanics. Stark rejects him. That rejection is the whole engine of the plot.

Black wrote the screenplay with Drew Pearce. The pair pushed the script toward character work and thriller elements, and they pulled concepts from Warren Ellis’s “Extremis” comic book story arc. The result is a film that keeps its villain origin in a moment of casual rudeness, not a grand ideology. It is a small, mean start, and it works.

Stark Cannot Sleep

Thirteen years later, Stark is not well. He has post-traumatic stress disorder from the alien invasion of New York in The Avengers (2012), and he has frequent panic attacks. He builds dozens of new Iron Man suits to cope with his insomnia. The suits create friction with his girlfriend Pepper Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is also the CEO of Stark Industries.

Downey said the team tried to be practical about the post-Avengers world. “What are his challenges now? What are some limitations that might be placed on him?” he said. “And what sort of threat would have him, as usual, ignore those limitations?” That question is the film’s best idea. Stark’s limitation is not a stronger enemy. It is his own head.

The Mandarin Goes on Television

A string of bombings is claimed by a terrorist called the Mandarin. Stark’s security chief Happy Hogan, played by Jon Favreau, is badly injured in one attack and put into a coma. Stark responds with a televised threat to the Mandarin, and he reveals his home address while doing it. The Mandarin sends gunship helicopters to destroy Stark’s house.

Hansen had come to warn Stark. She survives the attack with Potts. Stark escapes in an experimental new suit, which his artificial intelligence J.A.R.V.I.S., voiced by Paul Bettany, flies to rural Tennessee. The armor is not fully functional and lacks the power to get back to Malibu. The world believes Stark is dead.

It is the best stretch of the film: a superhero stripped to a broken prototype in a small town.

Harley Keener and the Explosion That Came Early

In Tennessee, Stark gets help from Harley Keener, a local boy. Together they investigate the remains of a local explosion that carries the hallmarks of a Mandarin attack. The problem is the date. It happened years before any known Mandarin attack.

Stark works out that the “bombings” were triggered by soldiers who had been subjected to Extremis. Their bodies explosively rejected the treatment. A.I.M. attributed the explosions to a terrorist plot to cover up Extremis’ flaws. The Mandarin, then, is a front. Ben Kingsley plays Trevor Slattery, the man inside it.

Who Plays Whom

Kingsley’s turn is the film’s most talked-about piece of casting, and it is a genuine swing. The film spends its first half building the Mandarin as a monstrous voice on video, then reveals the man behind the voice as an actor. It is a joke about terrorism as theater, and it lands because Kingsley plays both halves without a wink.

The supporting cast also includes Miguel Ferrer. Filming ran from May 23 to December 17, 2012, mostly at EUE/Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, with additional work around North Carolina, Florida, Los Angeles, and China. An extended version was cut specifically for Chinese audiences.

The Suits Are the Romance

Marvel’s Kevin Feige described the film’s real romance plainly. “The love triangle in this movie is really between Tony, Pepper and the suits,” he said. He also said the film uses Potts to play with the damsel in distress trope, asking whether she is in danger or the savior.

Paltrow’s read on the character is that she still adores Stark but gets fed up with him. “He gets caught in a feedback loop,” she said. That loop is the film’s subject, and it is why the middle hour is stronger than the finale. A man who cannot sleep and keeps building armor is more interesting than a man who wins.

Drew Pearce compared Stark to an American James Bond, calling both “heroes with a sense of danger to them, and unpredictab[le],” though he noted Stark is a free agent rather than an authority figure. He also likened Stark to the protagonists of 1970s films like The French Connection (1971), where the quirks of the hero are what make him exciting. Black’s script chases that idea hard. Sometimes it catches it.

Where the Third Act Loses Its Grip

The third act trades the Tennessee detour for a large-scale rescue and a final confrontation, and the movie gets louder as it gets less specific. The Extremis soldiers are a fine physical threat, but they are not a character, and the film has already spent its best energy on the people. Killian’s plan is legible. It is just not as interesting as his grudge.

The Mandarin reveal is the hinge the whole film turns on, and it divides the room for a reason. It is clever, and it is also a bait-and-switch that spends a great villain to make a point about how villains are sold. That is a real idea. It is not always a satisfying one.

The film also carries a strange weight for a franchise entry. Stark’s panic attacks are treated as a condition, not a gag. The suits are treated as a symptom. That is more than most superhero films attempt, and it is the reason Iron Man 3 holds up better than its reputation suggests.

6.9 of 10

Iron Man 3 is a good film with a great middle and a serviceable end. Black and Pearce built a thriller around a man whose real enemy is his own inability to stop working, and Downey plays that without vanity. The Mandarin twist is the boldest thing in the movie and the most divisive. The Tennessee section, with Harley and a suit that cannot fly, is the best material in the franchise to this point.

The score is 6.9 of 10. That number is honest. This is not the best Iron Man film, and it is not the worst. It is the one that took the most chances, and the chances are why it is worth watching again.

Iron Man 3 · Marvel Cinematic Universe · movie review · Robert Downey Jr. · Shane Black · The Mandarin