Tin Man

Rating: 5/10 (28 April 2013)

The first Iron Man was an unexpected delight. The second Iron Man was the perfunctory comic book movie we thought the first was going to be. And now here comes Iron Man "Three" (I'm not sure why it's not numerical). Tony Stark (an increasingly bored- and bitter-looking Robert Downey Jr), traumatised by the events of Avengers Assemble, taunts a bonkers terrorist megastar named The Mandarin (an amusing Ben Kingsley, wholly self-mocking), who then proceeds to blow up the Stark empire. So, rather than the franchise going bigger and badder, and rather than a potentially intriguing P.R. head-to-head between the world's two greatest egomaniacs, we get a kind of origins tale. Again.
I wanted to like Iron Man "Three", mostly because it represents the final piece of the Shane Black resurrection puzzle (the puzzle being why he hasn't been consistently at the forefront of wisecracking blockbuster Hollywood ever since Lethal Weapon), but I could only let it pass harmlessly over me. It has stacks of great ideas and some whizzy dialogue, but it's also tonally erratic, narratively reckless and overlong. And I can't help feeling that the fanboy-angering twist in the middle might simply be there to make up for the lack of an interesting bad guy.
This feels like a good place to leave the standalone Iron Man movies, although Stan Lee's money-making machine shows no sign of slowing, especially now that he's realised that the Chinese are lapping up his solid, gaudy entertainments like there's no tomorrow. Just because the returns this time aren't as diminished as part two, that doesn't mean we need a fourth. All good things come in threes. Except The Godfather.