Not quite as amazing as 1 / 2 / Avengers. Here's my thoughts why.

Rating: 7/10 (25 April 2013)

****** MASSIVE-SPOILERS ****** You can tell I'm a huge fan of the Iron Man / Avengers films because I never usually feel the need to talk about a film as much as I have this one.
Firstly, the movie was good! It just wasn't up to the exceptional standard as the other three. My favourite scene was when Pepper was saved near the start when Tony sent his suit to "cocoon" her as she was flying towards the wall. That had me saying "YES!!" out loud and grinning :) Was cool seeing her don the suit. That was the only point in the movie I got excited though :( Secondly, I did the bad thing and watched the first Iron Man 3 trailer a few months ago. I never usually do it but I didn't think it would spoil the film as it was an early, quite short trailer. It looked great and it did a good job at not giving away too much. But it also did a good job of portraying the film as something it's not. It made some emphasis on Mandarin's rings etc. and didn't show the little boy etc.
Here is what I identified as the reasons I was left feeling underwhelmed.
A bit too much slapstick (particularly in the battles). The first movies did see Tony Stark and his gadgets have the occasional mistakes, and that was amusing and played to make the character more realistic and show he wasn't perfect. In 3 though, it happened in nearly every scene and just took away his "cool" factor. The film came close to being so silly it could have been an Iron Man spoof. You can't be arrogant and come across as awesome if you're really just always making mistakes and getting in a mess. His suit was always falling apart and it lost the realism that the other films had as he would regularly fall to his death with hardly any armour on and survive without a scratch and get up to fight someone without the suit, showing no pain at all.
The kick-ass tracks from AC/DC that were closely linked with Tony Stark's style and were removed completely from 3. The most awesome scene in recent cinematic history is in Avengers when Iron Man hacks the radio of the Avenger's gun ship during the first battle with Loki, plays "Shoot to Thrill" and then says his cool line and crashes down and stop the fight.
Over the top (in a bad way). Simply throwing various aspects of the iron man lore into the film as 'cheap thrills' to make some "money shots" for the film trailer to make a quick summer block buster. Such as the ~40 different Iron Man suits which they only gave a second of screen time to each. Some of the iconic ones such as the (apparent) "Hulkbuster" suit only being shown for a split second running under something, getting stuck and then lifting it with its back. Additionally, the whole battle on the ship yard, there were many iron man suits flying around, circling and doing nothing. Right up to the very end where (seemingly) all the bad guys but one was dead. Tony was desperately trying to climb some scaffolding to rescue Pepper for several minutes, and finally go to her but couldn't reach her and then she fell to her death. This whole time you could see the Iron Man suits aimlessly circling them in the background. Any one of them could have come to help or even rescue Pepper from the fall. I know obviously she had to fall to make the whole regeneration scene work but this just emphasises the silliness of having 40 iron man suits hidden away and then just blowing them all up afterwards. It's called Iron Man, not Iron Men. Don't ruin the franchise by watering it down with the possibility of having many clones of the main character.
Mandarin was handled in a rather messed up way. It was a funny and interesting at first, but I kept thinking he would suddenly get back into character, put on some rings and try to kill Tony as if he was just pretending to be a clueless actor. I still don't get what happened here. I don't know much about the villain's lore but from what I've read and heard, he has 10 rings which give him abilities. So what on earth was this all about saying mandarin wasn't real, it was just an actor. Although, near the end the real bad guy did says he was mandarin, but he had no rings... I can only imagine he comes back in the next movie and makes them? Some review site I read said that the film was let down because they chose an unmemorable villain, that annoyed me as all Iron Man villains, in fact, Iron Man himself as "unmemorable" for the typical movie goer. I had never read a comic book till I saw the first two Iron Man movies but I loved every second of them. And I had never heard of "Iron Man" till the first film.
Not enough R&D. In past movies you saw Tony working hard in his lab trying to crack a problem to gain that extra improvement for his suit. This adds to the realism as you can see his inventions aren't just magically conjured up, he works hard to develop them. In this film they gloss over this aspect and you just see tonnes of new gadgets but no "Going into hardware mode" type scene. What we did get was a shopping spree montage in a hardware store, a kid fixing/keeping company the iron man suit and a few seconds of putting on an electric glove.
Lastly, a minor point, Stark Towers wasn't shown at all. I loved that place. Seeing Pepper and Tony hanging out in the apartment above NYC was awesome.