…When Guy Pearce, who was up to no good, started makin’ trouble in my neighborhood
There’s this indescribable zing to Iron Man 3. The jokes pop, the action sizzles and the evil seems that much more ominous. It’s a dish that bares the same texture and smell as any garden-variety franchise sequel. A more cogent dissection under a brighter light may reveal that it’s built on a rotten foundation: fresh meat turned gamy, crusty bread now stale and moldy. Make no mistake, Iron Man 3 is built on rusted rungs. But for some puzzling reason, it is far more than the sum of its parts and perhaps the best Marvel movie since the original Iron Man.
The fact that it’s such a wily delight is especially surprising considering the films that led up to it, specifically The Avengers — a loud, brash, thick-skulled cash cow created simply to get everyone’s favorite superheroes in one room. In Shane Black’s (A.W.O.L) Iron Man 3, however, The Avengers only exists as a shadow, an echo of the past that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) is trying to both reconcile with and completely forget. It’s a strange internal duality, something that eats up our elusive protagonist, yet at the same time makes him more human than ever before.
New York — the location of the final battle in The Avengers that involved aliens, explosions and the near-annihilation of the massive metropolis — functions as a melodramatic buzzword here; every time someone mentions the city or Loki or his Avengers counterparts, Stark has a panic attack. You begin to wonder if this is the film in which Iron Man becomes too pressing a responsibility for Stark — if after years of honorable peacekeeping services, his life as a vigilante has finally become too much for his shrapnel-encrusted heart.
The plot is certainly knotty enough to warrant a retirement. Things center on crippled scientist Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce, Lawless), whose company, Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.), possesses a regenerative treatment for missing limbs called Extremis that has scientific promise but is still highly faulty. Yet he begins operating on people anyway, helping them grow back their severed parts but with a serious drawback: The flaw in the formula leads to superhuman strength and heat-generating powers. One of the first experiments with Extremis in a small town in Tennessee causes patients to explode.
Killian approached Stark about joining his A.I.M. team in 1999 at a New Year’s party — shown in the movie’s boozy opening scene — but Stark, already an innovative corporate rockstar by then, turned him down in order to sleep with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall, Lay the Favorite), the true inventor of Extremis and a future part of Killian’s scientific team. She tells him about the flaw in Extremis, and in a drunken haze the next morning, he leaves her with a written attempt to correct her erroneous formula. Present-day Killian, still a reluctant admirer of the same man who chided and dismissed him at that fateful party, tries to blackmail Stark into fixing his beguiled science project by kidnapping Stark’s girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, Thanks for Sharing), and threatening the president of the United States. Or something like that.
There’s a side plot involving Killian as a terrorist mastermind, but for most of the movie, we’re led to believe the real villain is an enigmatic man named the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley, The Dictator). We meet the Mandarin, a bearded, bin Laden-esque talking head, through a series of live TV broadcasts. The film’s big twist — also Iron Man 3’s zaniest and best revelation — is the Mandarin’s true identity and connection to Extremis. Spoilers aside, it’s a wacky bait-and-switch decision that takes the piss out of how self-serious superhero movies have become, a welcome regression to frivolity away from the icy, Gothic terrain of Gotham City.
How Black connects the two seemingly disparate sources of evil — the Extremis camp and the Mandarin — is messy, though. Killian is too brainy to be fueled by intrinsic evil alone. Apart from his lust for both scientific acclaim and, apparently, Pepper, we never really know why he turns out so murderous in the end. But his presence as a tried-and-true nerd allows his perpetual quarrel with Stark to be more a battle of wits and intellect than anything. And never before has Stark been this witty.
Iron Man 2 and The Avengers were both clunky misfires because Stark spent too much time in the suit, which, as a result, contrived the reliable Downey Jr. into a lifeless body inside a hollow hunk of metal.
Here, outside the suit with his deadpan personality in tow, he roams free — a manic tinkerer-turned-inventor-turned-lovable hero who only wants to do one simple thing: tell a goddamn joke.
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