It took an extra week, but I finally went to see this last night.
…and there’s no way that I can write about this one without talking about SPOILERS!!!!!
I guess you could say that I’m a little torn about the whole thing.
I mean, I walked out of the theater actually pretty disappointed, but since then I’ve talked about a few of my hang-ups and I don’t know … I guess I was just hoping for a different Iron Man movie than the one that we got.
Namely, I came to this movie hoping to see Iron Man be awesome – you know, flying around, kicking ass, making sarcastic remarks … but instead, the movie that I watched was two hours of Iron Man getting the shit kicked out of him.
And that’s fine for character development and all, which I get was more what this movie was all about, but it was just hard for me to see things so unbalanced against Iron Man when for three movies now we’ve seen him pretty much be the more or less unstoppable bad ass, and yet here in Iron Man 3 he was getting his iron ass handed to him every other minute. I mean, I get it when he didn’t have a suit at all, or he’s working with old or incomplete armor, but the last scene in particular kinda bugged me that the second he did get on a perfectly fine working suit, one of the bad guys was peeling it back off his body not 15 seconds later! The reason he needed so many was because they were going through them like cheap Halloween costumes!
I just would’ve liked to see that scene in particular go a little differently, in that once his good suit showed up, Tony was back to being the bad ass that we all know and love, and the shit hit the fan for the bad guys.
Also, I kinda felt that an opportunity was lost in that scene – right after Rhodey watches Iron Man suit up and asks about his suit, instead of the quick slap of not having a suit for him, I just thought it’d been much cooler if at that moment an original War Machine suit showed up for Rhodey, i.e. sans red, white, and blue paint job. I mean, they picked on the color scheme the whole movie anyways, why not a nice jab with Tony saying, “Maybe it’s time for you to go back to the classic look…” or something instead of a cheap jab at Rhodey’s expense?
As for the rest of the movie? Meh … I ended up reading a spoiler before we went, so the surprise of The Mandarin not actually being a bad guy wasn’t much of a surprise for me, but I never read the comic books so that didn’t really bother me one way or the other.
Pepper being in the suit wasn’t a very big deal for me because she was only in it for like 30 seconds and Tony was the one who shoved her into it in the first place.
And Guy Pearce as the actual bad guy … I guess I just don’t really like that guy as an actor in the first place. He always comes off as the same nice on the outside, but slimy just under the surface bad guy who always ends up stabbing somebody in the back, and I’m just not a fan.
Not to mention, they really seemed to wrap up a lot of loose ends after the final defeat, with Tony blowing up the suits and then having the shrapnel removed from his heart … combined with the real life reports that Robert Downey, Jr. may not necessarily be keen about any more Iron Man movies, it felt kind of anticlimactic for the hero … like maybe we’ll see him in The Avengers 2, but not in Iron Man 4.
I don’t know – maybe it’s ok that this is as far as we’re going to get with the series … that’s been a real concern of mine ever since I watched and was blown away by The Avengers last summer because the ever-looming question is whether Disney/Marvel is going to be able to keep this momentum going with multiple heroes each having their own storylines and then also coming together for group movies, too … Iron Man most certainly started the momentum for the last swing, but will the next batch of sequels be able to carry us through to another Avengers flick two years from now?
Makes me real curious to see how Thor 2 turns out this fall, even though Captain America 2 is the one that I’m really looking forward to.
Oh yeah, and one last thing … those credits?!
They felt so amateurish and totally didn’t fit the feel for the rest of the series – it’s like they were wrapping up a ’60s Batman movie. Didn’t make Iron Man seem like a bad ass, and didn’t fit for me at all.
This is actually the first Marvel movie where I left the theater disappointed, and even though I’m starting to come around on parts of it upon further reflection, I still don’t see how anyone can consider Iron Man 3 to be the best one yet. For be it still goes sequentially right in order – 1, 2, 3.