IRON MAN 3
IRON MAN 3 is a tricky film to review. With all the other Marvel films I've reviewed lately, my opinion has been broadly in line with the general reception to the film. Of course there are some outliers and folks who disagree or feel more strongly about certain films, but broadly speaking, it seems there is a general consensus amongst movie-goers about what Marvel Studios films are in the top tier of their best efforts, and which ones aren't. But with IRON MAN 3, it's a lot more complicated. While it did huge box office and received generally strong critical reviews, amongst the comics fanbase, this is a deeply divisive film. I've talked to some people who not only dislike it, but brand it a turkey and a disgrace to superhero cinema on par with BATMAN & ROBIN, people who hate the film so much that they say Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr's performance, and the prospect of any future solo films with the character have been forever ruined for them based on its sheer awfulness. I wonder if these people saw the same film I did. Because, as I'll argue in this review, IRON MAN 3 is actually a freaking great film, and probably the most unfairly maligned in the Marvel canon. And to get into the divergence between how well this works as a film and how poorly it was received by many Iron Man fans, I'll have to talk at length about something called fan service.
Depending on who you are, you may view fan service as a great or terrible thing and attach a lot of baggage to the term, but at its most basic level, "fan service" is when the impression is created that a piece of fiction is crafted specifically with its most dedicated fans in mind. This could be a long-running TV series writing for its longtime core fanbase, or an adaptation playing to devotees of the source material. It is often brought up as something done at the expense of appealing to a wider audience, and is thus seen as bad, but it's not necessarily so. In fact, I'd argue that a huge part of the early success of Marvel Studios was built on fan service. Much of the Fox superhero output seemed to be entrenched in this embarrassment about making funny book films, with an obsessive, meddling need to arbitrarily change characters in both appearance and personality to "make them work on film," often to disastrous effect. Even the far more successful Nolan Batman films from Warner Bros made their name on "grounding" the superhero mythos into something more closely resembling the real world. But the MCU movies are made by Marvel, the same folk who make the comics, and so they didn't approach the comics source material they were adapting from as something that needed fixing. And suddenly we're getting comic-accurate costumes, shared universes, and loads of Easter eggs and little nods to the rich comic mythos. These aren't slavish translations from comics to film, but they adapt in a way that is respectful to the comics source material, and fans have really responded to that.
Then, along comes IRON MAN 3. After the still somewhat enjoyable but flimsy and complacent IRON MAN 2, replacing Jon Favreau with Shane Black was just about the best creative decision Marvel could have made. With all due respect to Favreau, who I like, Shane Black is just on another level as a filmmaker. As a writer and, increasingly, as a director, he has shown himself to be skilled and highly stylish. He gets better work out of Robert Downey Jr than anyone, and I hope they go on to forge a Scorsese/DeNiro style partnership for years to come. He injects IRON MAN 3 with a whole different kind of energy. IRON MAN 2 skewed too close to the loose, improvisational style of IRON MAN and by the end the formula was already feeling tired. So Shane Black upends that by giving us a story that's tight, structured, and - with its Christmas setting, protagonist voiceover and snarky, scene-stealing henchmen - one that feels stylistically much more like a Shane Black film than what we've come to expect from an Iron Man film. Black, like Whedon or Gunn, really puts his director's imprint on the film, and reaps the benefit from doing so. Black's trademark mastery of whip-smart dialogue is present and correct, but he really steps up as an action director too, with sequences like the attack on Stark's mansion among some of my favourite Marvel movie action set-pieces thus far. Black gives the IRON MAN franchise a shot in the arm that breaks the much-vaunted "part 3 curse" and proves a rewarding wrap on the trilogy, while also showing there's gas in the tank for plenty more diverse Iron Man films.
But the problem is, Shane Black does this while disregarding fan service almost entirely. Perhaps not entirely unreasonably, comics fans will go into an IRON MAN movie and want to see the focus be Iron Man, in his armor, being a superhero. But, almost defiantly, Black keeps Tony Stark out of the armor for much of the film, and even when he does suit up, the featured armor here is ass-ugly and regularly malfunctions because its still a prototype. And for many, this is a setback they just can't look past. They bring up the lack of Tony Stark in his Iron Man armor as if it was a terrible mistake, and not an absolutely deliberate thematic choice. When writing the script, Shane Black didn't come into this thinking, "How do I service Marvel Comics fans?" His starting point was looking at this guy, Tony Stark, as a movie character, whose story we have seen unfold over three films. Then, as a writer, Black looked at what worked about this film character, what were his most interesting aspects, and where could he be taken next? What kind of statement could be made about this character?
The result is the most nuanced performance Robert Downey Jr has given as Tony Stark yet. After essentially learning the same lesson three films in a row, here Tony Stark is faced with new struggles. He's still clearly the same guy, but one who is moving forward, evolving. The events of THE AVENGERS have left him suffering anxiety attacks, and as a result the armors that were once like protruding limbs - an extension of himself that allowed him to be more than he once was - have become cocoons for him to hide behind, enabling crutches lulling him into being something less than himself. Of course he's going to end up out of the armor for much of the film, because that's crucial to the character journey he must take to realise he doesn't need to rely on that armor. The armor isn't the hero of these films. Tony Stark is the hero. Tony Stark is Iron Man, with or without his armor. The armor is just one of many tools at his disposal that he employs in his heroics. To underline this, the film has everybody and their mother - Pepper Potts, Savin, Killian, even the President - jumping into armor that doesn't belong to them, and we have a whole sequence revolving around suits operating on their own without any pilot, but none of them are Iron Man.
In general, IRON MAN 3 really works as a character-centric film. While much of the wit and the abrasive qualities from the previous films is present and correct, I'd say characters and their interactions aren't quite so glib as they were in IRON MAN 2. Tony Stark is probably the most likeable he's been here, while still being recognisable as the magnificent bastard of the previous films. Gwyneth Paltrow continues to be highly likeable as Pepper Potts, and here relishes the chance to actually get physical and take part in some hard-hitting action. Don Cheadle's James Rhodes is better served here than in any other film too. While Rhodes too often descends into being the kill-joy straight man who has to spoil Tony's fun, in this film you can actually buy the two of them as friends, and Rhodes really gets to be a hero in his own right, even going through a smaller version of Tony's "I don't need my suit to be a hero" arc. Even Jon Favreau's Happy Hogan is better here than ever before.
Another much-derided aspect of the film is Tony Stark's "kid sidekick," Harley. I don't really have a problem with this dynamic at all, as I found Stark's dealings with the kid to be refreshingly unsentimental. Plus, in the grand scheme of things they were kept to a minimum. As a whole, I really enjoyed the entire Rose Hill sequence in how it changes up the dynamic of the film, the barren snow standing in stark contrast to the usual sun-soaked settings of these films.
But IRON MAN 3 isn't without its faults. And one false note that continues to bug me every time I watch the film is the reveal about The Mandarin. I've seen the ludicrous decision taken with this character defended by some who argue that it's fine because The Mandarin was always a lame character in the comics anyway. But I reject that notion, not just because The Mandarin actually has been used well in the comics in recent years (The "Haunted" storyline written by the Knaufs features The Mandarin and is arguably my favourite Iron Man comic story ever), but because right up until the rug is pulled out from under us, Ben Kingsley had given us a FANTASTIC interpretation of The Mandarin! Glimpsed only in menacing video broadcasts, and speaking in a guttural Southern drawl, this was a Mandarin that felt fresh and updated, and a most appropriate arch nemesis for the cinematic Iron Man we first saw as a hero for the "War on Terror" age back in 2008. He was a great villain... until he wasn't. This was one area where maybe Shane Black SHOULD have given a little fan service and respected The Mandarin's status as Iron Man's arch-villain. I remember when I first saw this film in the cinema, when that twist happened, that was it, BOOM, I was totally taken out of the movie. I sat through the rest of the film in a fog, thinking, "F*** this film." And I think that's a fog many viewers have remained in ever since: "F*** this film."
However, the more I rewatch this movie, the more I appreciate its strengths. And while no amount of rewatching makes me find the Trevor Slattery scenes any less toe-curling, I've come to acknowledge that, out of the ashes of The Mandarin's sabotage, Guy Pearce's Aldrich Killian emerges as a great antagonist, one with possibly the most inspired evil plan to come from any MCU villain thus far. And Pearce plays him with a wonderfully smug, slimy charm. Thematically, he ties in nicely to the "dark mirror image" theme of Obidiah Stane, Ivan Vanko and Justin Hammer, but thanks to the added element of Extremis brings a fresh new dynamic to the "Bad guy in a bigger robot" special effect that has replaced the actor playing the villain in the third act of the previous two IRON MAN films. I think people would appreciate Killian as a character a lot more if he was an actual comics villain, rather than practically an original creation (elevated from a brief walk-on part in the original comics "Extremis" storyline) crafted for this film. I should also add here that I love James Badge Dale's Savin, he manages to steal just about every scene he's in.
The first IRON MAN was a little film that could, and IRON MAN 2 enjoyed a bigger budget but chose to pretty much ape the first film's minimalist aesthetic rather than expand in scope. IRON MAN 3, however, settles in with true post-AVENGERS gravitas as the first Marvel solo film that swaggers out of the gate and proclaims, "I'm one of the biggest films of the year." It remains one of Marvel's most stylistically, thematically bold films, and in my opinion, up there with the best of the Marvel Studios canon. In terms of the IRON MAN trilogy, the historical significance and how fresh and new it felt at the time probably means the first IRON MAN still edges by as my favourite, but talking objectively, I'd venture to say IRON MAN 3 is the best film of the trilogy.
8/10
