Cory Massimino

Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

September 19, 2020 by Cory

★★½

Iron Man 3 is so middling. We get a good dose of Shane Black eccentricity but are also subjected to a convoluted plot and boring villains. The first hour, about Tony’s PTSD and meeting Harley, is quite good. The rest is muddled and kind of ridiculous. This take on the Mandarin used to annoy me but I’ve come to think it’s one of the most novel and interesting risks the MCU has taken when it comes to radically departing from the source material. He was turned into a foil for Tony: a playboy irresponsibly complicit in evil.

Apparently Perlmutter nixed the attempt to have the big bad be a woman (only boys buy toys didn’t you know?) and what we got was just kind of bland and forgettable. And shoehorning presidents into superhero stories almost always makes obvious the ridiculousness of the situations. The attempt at exploring PTSD and anxiety is truly appreciated but it’s entirely dropped by the third act! Less political contrivances and more heartfelt Tony character growth!

One really underrated scene is Tony saving all the people who fell out of the plane. It’s not only super cool looking, it shows what superheroes are supposed to do: save people. Sometimes these movies lose sight of that! Tony’s scenes with Harley are endlessly entertaining. Iron Man 3 opts to never mention Tony’s dad (unlike its predecessors) and instead simply forces Tony into a situation where he has to play the closest thing he can to a father figure. Harley is a sarcastic, intelligent tinkerer. Like Tony. And like Peter Parker later on. He really foreshadows Tony’s later development into a more responsible father figure. Bringing him back for Tony’s funeral in Endgame is quite the thoughtful detail.

The MCU in general uses Tony’s suit in clever, funny, and symbolic ways but Iron Man 3 does it perhaps better than all the rest. The suit is elevated to its own character with Tony remotely wielding it, exchanging looks with Pepper, and being treated as a wounded soldier by Tony. It was a stroke of genius to center this movie on Tony using his suits as psychological crutches, then taking everything away from him and forcing him to seek out help and MacGyver his way out of every problem. It harkens back to Tony finding his best self in the cave in Iron Man 1. There’s also just lots of neat little moments of cleverly employing the suit, like when Tony uses it to shield Pepper when their house is bombed. The suit truly became an extension of him in this movie. Quite the transhumanist superhero!

The final action sequence has a cool premise but ends up being too chaotic to really get immersed in. And it continues the annoying trend of Iron Man movies ending with fights in darkly lit areas at night. Blowing up the suits was a great way to cement Tony’s arc though. Overall, Iron Man 3 has better ideas in theory than in practice but it’s a valiant if largely forgettable attempt.

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