After the semi-disappointing Avengers, I was more than a little worried that another legendary director would let me down. Shane Black, Iron Man 3's director, has worked with Robert Downey Jr. before in one of my favorite comedies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And if you haven't seen this masterwork of a film, I suggest you drop everything and go watch it right now. Finish reading my blog post, though. I need the hits. I was also worried about another great film franchise dying a slow and painful death, like the year's first travesty, A Good Day to Die Hard. So I went into the theater understandably apprehensive.
Fortunately, I was not disappointed: Iron Man 3 is friggin' amazing. First off, it gives a little more depth to the basically one-dimensional character of Tony Stark, giving him anxiety attacks after the events of The Avengers. Secondly, the franchise finally had a fantastic villain (not quite up to the standards set by Heath Ledger's Joker) in the form of Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, an Osama bin Laden-Mummar Qadaffi mix who blows s**t up across the country on a regular basis.
Tony's bodyguard is the victim of one of these bombs, and he puts out a message to The Mandarin, telling him that he isn't afraid. And so The Mandarin blows up his house. It's an incredibly sad scene, as this monumental bachelor pad, the very symbol of superhero-level decadence, is razed to the ground. Stark ends up flying to Tennessee, where he discovers that the bombs aren't bombs-- they're actually failed experiments.
Apparently, someone is giving amputees treatments that will allow them to magically regrow their limbs, but sometimes they 'overheat' and blow the f**king hell up. This is where the plot starts to unravel. Guy Pearce, the villain, has created an army of evil former-cripples... but how did they turn evil? Do we just assume that if an amputee is given new limbs, they will automatically turn evil? It makes not an ounce of sense.
However, I can overlook this, because right after that scene is one of the best moments in all of comic book-filmdom: We meet Ben Kingsley's character in real life, and he's actually a British crack-smoking hooker-hiring actor who's been cooped up in a mansion for months. He's being used to play The Mandarin during broadcasts, and the bombs are just people overheating and Guy Pearce explaining them away as terrorist attacks.
In the final scenes, Stark saves the president from being killed (and stops Guy Pearce from installing the vice-president as a puppet leader), and Pepper Potts gets the limb-regrowing treatment. So instead of just sitting around like she did in The Avengers, she gets to kill Guy Pearce by blowing him up with a .50 caliber shell. Ben Kingsley and the VP are arrested, and everyone goes home happy.
So, what did I think? Well, as always, I loved RDJ as Tony Stark, and Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin sure as hell didn't hurt anything. Unfortunately, it did get a little too action-y (if that were possible). What's great about the Iron Man series is that it centers more around the characters than the explosions. But the final battle in this one was almost... dare I say it... reminiscent of Transformers. Still, the cast is great, it's funny, it's witty, and you shouldn't listen to the fanboys complaining about how it "Doesn't adhere to the comics." Nobody gives a flying f**k.
Final score for Iron Man 3? 8.5/10 stars. It's actually better than the second one, and the first really worthwhile blockbuster of the year. But that all will change with Star Trek: Into Darkness in two weeks. CAN'T F**KIN' WAIT!!!
And as an aside, yesterday marked the four-year anniversary of G-Force Productions, and the initiation date of this blog. Ironically, it also lands on National Star Wars Day (as in, 'May the fourth be with you').
Bye!
No comments:
Post a Comment