good special effects and some good acting, but plot sucks

Rating: 7/10 (17 August 2013)

While I understand that a movie storyline often take a dramatically different path than say a book, due to cramming a story into a short timespan, shooting time and budgets, the fact that the Iron Man films have such a diverse wealth of story lines they can draw from, would only make anyone familiar with them watch this film with greater and greater despair until the final ending.
It's a horrible concoction of a few Iron Man story lines, mashed together and altered to make no sense at all. What is worse is that simply one of these story lines, would have made a great film in itself. Despite some great acting throughout the film, I found it harder and harder to suspend my disbelief, by the end I was literally grinding my teeth and willing the film to end well before it actually did.
Now this part is a bit of a spoiler, so please don't read if you haven't seen the film yet. The original extremis project was a brilliant storyline, a super-solider experiment that falls into the hands of a twisted individual, making him super strong, super fast, and armed with multiple lethal abilities. Tony Stark as Iron Man is nearly fatally wounded in trying to stop this man going on a killing rampage, coming to the realisation that as he has improved the Iron Man suits, they have become stronger, but also slower and more unwieldy he decides on a new approach.
To save his life, the original scientist behind the development of Extremis, reprograms it to heal Tony, but Tony also makes some alterations to the program with his own ends in mind. Emerging from the Extremis cocoon far earlier than planned, the scientist finds that Tony has not only greatly speeded up his healing, he has also made significant changes to his body and how it works.
He is now able to control the Iron Man suites mentally, he has merged nano technology within him and parts of the suit are now contained in his bones, deployed through his skin to encase him in the first layers of the armour, cutting down on the weight of outer armour which can now fly to him as separate parts. His reaction times have been increased, his merging with the suit is now total as it is part of him, along with physical strength increases his mind can now tap into multiple sources of data at once.
While some of this is touched on in Iron Man 3, it is so confused and watered down that it bears little resemblance to the original storyline. Don't even mention the Mandarin, because that is even worse. What you get is a film that starts off fine, but becomes more and more vague, until at the end you wonder why they bothered.
If you aren't familiar with Iron Man, than you could always waste some time watching this, if only for the special effects, but otherwise id give it a miss.