Iron Man 3: Fun, but not super

There’s no denying that Robert Downey Jr. makes a good Tony Stark/Iron Man. He’s not as steely and cold as Christian Bale’s Batman, but he doesn’t need to be. Stark is a bit of an egotistical smart-ass and that comes naturally to Downey. He’s again terrific in Iron Man 3, but because the film’s convoluted plot (it’s based on the “Extremis” storyline from the comic book) is both overly ambitious and flimsy. Although entertaining, this isn’t a great sequel.

Iron Man 3 does expose a little more of Tony’s vulnerable side. The guy is literally having panic attacks that seem to have spawned from his recent trek through the wormhole when his head of security Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) gets severely injured in an apparent bombing orchestrated by a terrorist named Mandarin (Ben Kingsley).  Tony becomes enraged and even beckons the enemy to come and get him. And come and get him, they do, launching a missile attack on his Malibu home that nearly kills Tony and leaves his house and lab devastated.

NOTE: Here’s where you should stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie, read Wikipedia, watched the YouTube trailer closely, turned on the TV or talked to a friend since the film came out.  

Tony escapes to North Carolina in pursuit of an ex-soldier he thinks will lead him to Mandarin. While in Carolina, he befriends a young boy who helps him regroup so that he can take on Mandarin as well as Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a scientist he spurned some years ago. Of course, this all ultimately leads to a showdown between Iron Man and Aldrich and, because Aldrich has found a way to generate extreme heat with the mere touch of a hand, he’s a formidable enemy. Side plots involving Tony’s live-in girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow), Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) and former flame Dr. Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) don’t really go anywhere.

Working from a screenplay he wrote with Drew Pearce, director Shane Black struggles with the pacing of the film’s first two-thirds of the film (during which we see a lot of Stark and very little Iron Man) and then unloads so many special effects in the final third, that the movie resembles a Transformers flick (and that’s not meant to be a compliment). At the film’s end, Tony implies that he might be done with Iron Man and we can’t blame him for wanting to walk away from the superhero.