"Iron Man 3" review

Temperamental, but not tempered.

          Tony Stark begins his fourth outing as Iron Man in a bad place.  He is haunted by his near-death experience with The Avengers in New York, and is suffering serious post traumatic stress disorder.  Tony's once charming narcissism is now being eroded by his growing fear of death, not only from his new-found knowledge of massive alien armies lying in wait in beyond the stars, but also from the more intimate fact that now he truly has something to lose:  Pepper Potts.  Tony can’t sleep at night, and his fear over his ability to protect Pepper drives him to stay up all hours building new suits.  Despite the toll it takes on his mental state, this obsession is the only thing that assuages his worry over protecting his true love.

Tony knows that his love for Pepper can be used against him, and even though he builds suit after suit, peace of mind evades him.  Other past events have also come back to haunt him, and the film begins with a flashback where Tony makes two major mistakes that will later threaten to destroy him.  In the present, a new villain named The Mandarin appears, employing ex-soldiers with amazing recuperative powers.  When one of them is defeated in a fight, the resulting incendiary explosion puts Happy Hogan in critical condition.  Tony’s anger makes him overreact, and he dares The Mandarin to take him on.  The Mandarin responds with a rocket-powered helicopter assault on Tony's beach-cliff home.  Pinned down by the collapsing wreckage of his mansion, Tony is dragged to the ocean bottom and presumed dead.

While the action sequences are well-composed and entertaining, and the quips from Tony Stark continue to come fast and funny, the movie never finds its groove because we don’t spend enough time with Tony in those crucial, quiet moments.  The mood shifts too rapidly from scene to scene, and conversations end before they are finished.  “Iron Man 2” was disappointing for this very same reason.  The story was over-complicated and involved too many characters.  “Iron Man 3” is much the same.  It has a lot of good ideas, but nothing feels finished and the story never establishes the right rhythm.

There was a fantastic plot twist involving The Mandarin that I did not see coming, and I was very pleased to have my expectations overturned in such an unanticipated fashion.  However, it presented another problem because once the real villain was revealed, not enough time had been spent to generate much interest or concern.  A great villain must present the audience with the possibility of our hero actually losing the battle.  Tony stands to lose a lot, the stakes don't feel real.  The action sequences are fun, but they get rather silly, and the necessary dramatic heft is undermined or totally absent.

“Iron Man 3” tries to up the stakes for Tony Stark.  By collapsing his world around him, we are presented with a man whose inner flaws stand in sharp contrast to the mechanical marvels he has created.  However, because his character arc has too many ups and downs, it never feels like he’s really hit bottom long enough, the climb back up feels too short.  Instead of a massive boulder in the road, it feels more like a pebble.