Excellent comic action film; watch it!

Rating: 10/10 (10 December 2013)

It took me ages to watch this because of all the conflicting reviews. I thought it was going to be as bad/boring as Terminator Salvation or The Dark Knight Rises.
This film was fantastic! Easily the best of the Iron Mans (although the first will always be 'the best', this one is repeat-watch-worthy).
Now that I know how awesome this film is, I think the negative reviews make more sense: they seem to focus on things like 'but the bad guy isn't the same as the comic' or 'that's not believable' etc. so let's ignore those because that's just irrelevant. The film can still be good without sticking 100% to the comics! I can't believe some people complain about the realism when we're dealing with magic and flying iron man suits but okay, let's mark the film down because the hero didn't break his back quite enough in that scene?! I've given this a ten because the story progresses brilliantly, there are so many extra scenes included that you would normally expect to be edited out to keep the running time down but the fact that they're left in means the film has a well-rounded feel to it. Contrary to some opinions, I like that the woman has the chance to save the day instead of 'just' being eye-candy (Gwyneth wears the most amazing white office power-suit ever; congrats to the designer), it is a bit patronising to just have one scene of saving the day but it's better than nothing. One of the bad guys (Guy Pearce) is building a great profile for himself as being someone to watch out for as he might just steal the show! This film had it all, yes there's a cute kid, but this is Iron Man so it never gets cheesy and actually there are some hilarious scenes between Robert Downey Jr and the kid. There's loads of humour and the action is great.
Everyone gets just the right amount of screen time in my opinion and I'm actually going to watch this again which is rare for me.
10/10 as it's an excellent film - not perfect but excellent.