My Late Review for Iron Man 3 (Some Spoilers)

[Kenneth M. Lin]

I am going to write this down before Man of Steel opens so I won't get
things mixed up. I saw IM3 the first weekend but never got around to
writing the review because work was hectic.

First of all, this movie borrowed quite heavily from The Dark Knight
trilogy. Let me count the way...

1. Sham villain. They did it in Batman Begins.
2. Girlfriend is now a superhero. They did it with Anne Hathaway Catwoman.
3. Best friend getting severely injured. They did that with Harvey Dent.
4. Villains without convincing motives. They did that with Heath Ledger
Joker.

In reality this movie would have sold itself without any semblence of a plot
and it has grossed $395M as of writing so who am I to judge? This is a
franchise with heavy editorial supervision so you wouldn't know that they
switched directors.

And I must say that I hated the "yellow belly" armor. They played around
with the color scheme and came up with one of the ugliest armor in the Iron
Man history.

It was fun to see more than a dozen armors. I especially like the Hulk
Buster armour with its head protruding forward. It's a shame that you can
never get a good look at any of them.

So will there be Iron Man IV? I honestly don't care. No matter how well
Robert Downey, Jr. carries the character of Tony Stark, the story sucks and
the movie has pretty much caught up with the comic-book continuity after
just three iterations. I wonder if Iron Man will show up in the upcoming
Guardians of the Galaxy movie like he does in the comics.

Rebecca Hall was completely wasted (not from drinking) here. Her character
sort of disappeared from the movie after a while and I forgot what happened
to her.

Ben Kingsley has good comedic timing but his character is quite
two-dimensional (or less) and useless. He really hasn't done much since
Gandhi.

Hey, they even recycled the name "Iron Patriot." It was actually pretty
clever. However, Rhodey, never give out your password over a cell phone.

No toothpaste jokes? I am disappointed.

The movie begins on New Year's Eve, 2000 to set up some premises and
establish new characters. Then it quickly fast forwards to "present" time,
which is around Christmas. You wouldn't believe the present Tony got for
Pepper.

Immediately, there are stories about suicide bombers blowing themselves up
without leaving any trace of explosives. Sounds familiar?

Then Happy Hogan gets hurt and Tony flies over to some small town where
there's a lot of snow. His armor conks out and he broke into someone's
garage workshop to make repairs. I highly doubt that the armor would shut
down to the point where he cannot even make a phone call or wire money from
somewhere.

And he's threatened by... a potato gun!

And he's without armor for quite a while investigating a bomber then gets
attacked by another "bomber."

Then Pepper Potts is turned into one of the bombers and so on and that
ultimately leads to the final battle. And yes, she puts on an armor, just
like in the comic book.

Overall the story is all over the place and lack cohesion or plausibility.
It's by far the worst of the trilogy because it didn't accomplish anything
except that by the end of the movie, Iron Man is no more. Or would he?
(That's another one they swiped from Dark Knight.) Still, it was quite
entertaining and doesn't challenge your intellect, which is a good
compromise.

If they do make one more movie, please do feature some cool armor villains.
The first film had Iron Monger (lame) and second one had bunch of remote
drones (and War Machine) but this franchise could really use a good
one-on-one slug fest. Perhaps an armor based on some completely different
principles from Repulsor Technology. Heck, I'd settle for Titanium Man or
Crimson Dynamo.

The special effects are superb as usual. I especially like the
three-dimensional display where Tony can "interacting" with his hands. The
technology has advanced so much in the last decade that everything feels
plausible and yet not quite within reach yet.

Iron Man sort of broke ground in that he's one of the very first superheroes
without a secret identity. You could argue that's he's not a hero at all
and just a guy in a contraption doing whatever he wants in a sense that he's
not out there fighting crimes. In the next movie I would like to see Tony
in an iron lung that transforms into an armor. In order to keep his lungs
from collapsing, he could use the "inflatable" technology and fly by
expelling pressurized hot air.

P.S., Does anyone think Amy Adams is too old to play Lois Lane? She will be
thirty-nine in August and when the third installment comes out in six years,
she'd be forty-five.