The review
It was a 5 for most of the night, and then the kid made it a 6. Shane Black's Iron Man 3 is stop six on our road to Doomsday, following The Avengers, and Waifu and I walked in with our expectations still somewhere above New York. This one is a smaller movie on purpose: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) spends most of it out of the suit, or in one that keeps falling apart on him, stranded in a snowy Tennessee garage with a ten-year-old. That garage is the best thing in the movie.
The kid is Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins), and he opens with a potato gun pointed at the most famous man on Earth. What I love is that Tony never once talks to him like a child. Harley shares his backstory, dad went out for lottery tickets six years ago and never came back, and Tony's nonchalant reply boils down to "Dads leave, don't be a 🐱 about it." Then he moves straight on to his list of demands. They trade, they bicker, they make deals, and Harley holds his own against Robert Downey Jr., which is more than most of the adult cast manages. If the name wasn't enough of a hint, I'm a dad: a movie where the billionaire meets his match in a ten-year-old is my kind of superhero fight.
The panic attacks are the other thing this movie tries, and they're the right idea. Tony can't sleep since New York, he builds suits at three in the morning, and a kid saying the word "aliens" folds him in half. Downey plays it well; Waifu's note was "on point," which is where he always is. It's kind of interesting. It's also not that compelling, because the movie doesn't know what cured him. Waifu asked the fair question: what actually helped in the end? The panic attacks stop halfway, right after Harley tells him "You're a mechanic, right? Why don't you just build something?" Her read of what the movie was going for is better than the movie's:
It doesn't. Tony answers the question the way Tony answers everything: by building forty suits.
Now let's talk about the Mandarin. Ben Kingsley owns every broadcast he hijacks, fortune-cookie lecture included, and we both love the man, so he was great before he said a word. Then the twist: the terrorist is Trevor Slattery, a drugged-up stage actor hired to play one on TV, and the moment Tony finds him he's stumbling out of a bathroom warning everyone to give it twenty minutes. We didn't know who the Mandarin was supposed to be in the comics, so we got the surprise without the grief. Waifu called him the cherry on top and the reason to watch it at all. I asked what the fans were so upset about and whether there was really a short film about it. (Ava says: there is, Couch Dad. All Hail the King, a Marvel One-Shot that shipped with the Thor: The Dark World home release, where Trevor finds out there's a real one. Shane Black called it his apology to the angry fans.) Huh, maybe I'll check it out.
Which leaves the actual villain, and here Waifu was the one with the knife out. Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) is a man who "wants to conquer the world" (not really, he wanted to control the supply and demand of war, but I digress), and that is the whole file on him. He doesn't butcher the part; there's just no part to butcher. The first Iron Man gave its bad guy a foundation and a reason, and we can still picture Iron Man 2's guy with the whips in Monaco. This one got "who now?" from the couch, and that was during the movie.
The cake's still pretty tasty, to be fair. Air Force One gets ripped open and Tony catches thirteen people in freefall with a game of Barrel of Monkeys; that one's a cool one. Rhodey (Don Cheadle) and Tony going in with no suits, squabbling over spare magazines mid-firefight, is a treat, and the chemistry paid off. Happy (Jon Favreau) is hilarious in every scene he gets, including the one where he films only his own forehead. And the Tennessee supply run, Tony Stark walking out of a hardware store and turning a cart of parts into a one-man raid on a mansion, is a really fun bit about his creativity without a suit. Don't analyze it: the bodyguards are so dumb that things explode in the garden and nobody inside looks up. I take it as a stunt show, and the stunt show is good.
Waifu noticed something I hadn't: next to the first movie, where the tech is visibly not there yet, this is where it starts being super cool. Funny timing, because this is also the movie that mostly keeps Tony out of the armor, to ground him, humanize him a bit and hand him a new set of problems. It doesn't all work, but the part I liked best has no suit in it at all, so maybe they were onto something.
By the end the movie has carefully put every toy back in the box, and nothing in it changes anything for the universe. That's the shrug. It had the bad luck of following The Avengers, so impressive that anything after it would have felt like meh. Waifu's verdict: a typical action movie you watch once. The one good thing to come out of it for me: I'm genuinely excited to watch Age of Ultron again. There's a thread from here to there, I'm sure of it, I just can't remember which one. Oh, and stay for the scene after the credits, where Tony has been telling this whole story to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who fell asleep partway through. He's not that kind of doctor. Still, that session was so good it cured Tony's panic attacks.
Iron Man 3: the suits put on the fireworks show, the kid with the potato gun stole it.
