Tony's past comes back to haunt the USA.

Rating: 9/10 (19 September 2016)

The Three Acts:
The initial tableau: We open over a decade ago in Switzerland. Tony Stark participates wildly in end-of-the-year celebration parties. He meets Maya Hansen and Aldrich Killian, who try valiantly to convince him to be interested in technology developed by the think tank, AIM. Tony hardly listens, partly from buzz, partly from arrogance. He writes out a few equations which forward the effort considerably, gives them to Killian, and promises to meet Killian on the roof to develop the ideas further. But Tony breaks his promise.
In the present, after Tony participates in The Avengers action in New York City, there are multiple attacks by 'The Mandarin.' Tony is not all that involved until his friend Happy Hogan is nearly killed by one of the attacks. Tony declares war. The Mandarin is backed by individuals who have the Extremis treatments developed by AIM. They can melt Tony's suits from the heat of their bodies, regenerate severed limbs, and many other things. Tony has his work cut out for him.
Delineation of conflicts: 'The Mandarin' strikes first, destroying Tony's palatial estate on the California coast. Tony loses his armour, his labs, his base of operation, and soon enough, JARVIS and his suit. Or so it would seem. Tony has to figure out who the Mandarin really is, what AIM does, and how to counter the effects of Extremis, initially without his armour. Worst of all, the Extremis-enhanced folk capture Pepper, and start making her one of them. They kidnap War Machine (renamed Iron Patriot) and the President, whom they intend to replace using their own candidate. To make things even worse, Tony has recurrent PTSD from the action in New York.
Resolution: Will the Extremis transformation applied to Pepper be reversible? Will the President be recovered alive? Will Colonel Rhodes get free to fight alongside Tony?
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I never cared for the Mandarin, so I do not care about the portrayal of the Mandarin in IM3. I despised the character in the comics, and later hated the character in the animated series to the point that I gave up following Iron Man for a time. Only the Tony Stark films with RDJ in the cockpit got me interested again. What made Iron Man 1 great was the portrayal of Tony Stark coming back, against all odds, to defeat enemies of his own country, and enemies of his individual person. Iron Man 3 was a return to form after the wretched Iron Man 2. The third film was about Tony Stark, about his friends, about his fans who helped him when he was down, about the power of enduring love, which is what saved Stark in the end.