Review of Iron Man 3 (2013) by Severedwing — 23 May 2013

With less focus put on the "Iron Man" himself and more emphasis put on the Tony Stark character it is easy to see why people may not like this film in comparison to the heavy action-fighting of the previous two stories. I personally like that they took the time to develop a story that does not focus solely on the suit, but delves to reveal the inner character of the man beneath it. We see in this movie that Iron Man is a facade, a persona put on by a man to hide his inner demons and fears. The tie in with the Avengers movie helped the story quite a bit and it was easy to empathize with a clearly vulnerable character who seemed so invulnerable in previous iterations.

There is substantial story here which is why I think a lot of fanbois have rated this movie so poorly. They clearly wanted to see Iron Man launching missiles and blowing stuff up rather than dealing with his anxiety and frustrations. Personally this type of movie is far truer to the comics than any other and gives it a much more real feel. Iron Man is a man first and foremost, without the suit he isn't capable of laying waste to his foes and even when in the suit the weight of his humanity can still bear down on him and leave him vulnerable. This is the Iron Man I want to see more of, though it seems unlikely there will be much more of it.

With that said I have to say that it's main weakness is that it delves a bit too deeply into the life of Tony Stark, to the point where it seems the action of the movie plods a little. There were a few scenes that could have been cut to streamline the movie and keep the focus on the action a bit more. I praise it for it's focus on character development, but there is such a thing as too much "whining".

All in all this is a solid film, the people giving this 1 or 0 as a rating are obviously just angry that it is not a shot for shot remake of Iron Man 2 with robots annihilating each other. If that is what you want then wait for the god awful looking "Pacific Rim" to come out and enjoy your robots, but if what you want is a true sense of who Iron Man is and what the comic has always tried to reveal to its readers, then Iron Man 3 is the best of the series to date.