Nice Effects, Lame Story

Rating: 5/10 (26 April 2013)

So, first off, I was and still am fairly happy with the way the first two Iron Man movies were done. They made sense, established the characters etc. This movie... falls flat on that front.
1. The suits? Everyone who has seen the previous movies knows how much punishment Iron Man's armors can take before falling apart. In this movie, the upgraded new versions of the armor seem to be made of cheap plastics - what was able to handle tank shots and heat over 20k C° is now being torn apart by mildly enhanced people who can heat themselves up to a top 3k C°. That's not much of an upgrade, is it now?
2. The new characters? There are some.
The one night's stand woman who is later reintroduced as a corrupted genius working for the bad guys, and is only a part of the plot so that the Extremis could be HALF-explained? She regains her sense of righteousness after Tony Stark speaks about three sentences to her.
The Mandarin, who was set up in the trailer so awesomely as the main antagonist? He's just an actor in the movie, a "mascot" for the terrorist group - he didn't even know he was working for terrorists! Compare that to the comics' Mandarin who is using alien technology and is Iron Man's archenemy...
3. The plot?
Is full of holes. What is the Extremis? If Tony Stark could have removed the piece of shrapnel from his body whenever he felt like doing so, why didn't he do that in the first two movies? If the armor suits need to be charged from external sources, why does he need a super-powered magnet- generator in his chest when a low-powered one is just as efficient? How come that the armor pieces can fly more than a thousand kilometers at extreme speed without losing much energy but the full suit loses most of that after a shorter flight?
Overall, I was disappointed by this movie. It felt slow, there wasn't much character development, the enemies were lame and felt weak, the jokes got tiring very fast, and the ending seemed like something that was attached to the story during post-production. The hype it got before release also did not help with this. It is not a bad movie, but I would not recommend it for fans of the comics or for multiple re-sittings.