A must see... for merchandising students of all trades.

Rating: 5/10 (13 July 2013)

First things first: if you're going to make anything even remotely set in Rose Hill, Tennessee, you've just got to include a lot more corn-fed beauties than this movie does. Hey, even twelve-year-old toy consumers and Comcast die-hards will agree with me on this.
So, what do you get when screenwriters, producers, directors and actors have an all out battle-royal against the studio execs and merchandising hired hands for every minute of Iron Man's third installment? You get a big bag full of broken parts and pieces. Admittedly, someone's tried very hard to crazy-glue it up in time for the premier, my respects to that someone.
The plot is delivered in predictable and well timed Lester Dentesque quotas of predicament that lead up to a predictable climax, which is in turn predictably resolved in time for the predictable happy-reap-the-crops-of-wisdom ending. What the kind people who made the movie tried to do in an attempt to distract us from the "no surprise here" build up, is to mark-up the zeros on the CGI department checks—and distract us they do. Seamless virtual puppeteering amidst great explosions, visual delights do not disappoint as your eyes try not to blink and take it all in, but even this was expected, was it not? So you come around to the boilerplate characters doing boilerplate things, side kick bratty-nevertheless-lovable kid included. A point of interest may be to try and figure out why these kids get older lady hairdos, which in my modest opinion, should be CGI'd out of the final copy, they're just plain distracting (which just happened to me here).
Getting back to our boilerplate characters we find Iron Man 3's greatest failure, which is the portrayal of The Mandarin and how the execs, screenwriters and all those involved, tried to figure out a way around offending the massive Chinese Monies. On the one hand you have Tony's traditional—and therefore unavoidable Comcast-dollars—evil nemesis, who happens to be called the Mandarin which is as Chinese a name as you can come up with and on the other you have the mentioned Chinese Monies; all in a postmodern world scenario where the commies are no longer the bad guys, terrorists are, and we know where they come from right? So they took a few gigantic liberties and succeeded in sinking their ship as they shot their foot and looked the other way once the damage was done. They did not pull it off, Iron Man fans were right in taking offense, and once again you wonder how it feels to splurge in CGI only to completely fail at basic story writing. Maybe producers don't realize that they're get-the-money-geniuses, not story tellers, I don't know.
In regard to the merchandising department, they won; it took real brains and board room brawn to fill up so few minutes with so many potential toy ideas, kudos to them but there is a big twist, because it seems Mr. Downey Jr. got fed up of getting stuck in the sardine can and demanded something beyond his facial muscles got a chance to act, so they decided to turn him into a Jason Bourne meets MyGyver combo, with moderate success I may say. (Merch Special Black Ops Team figured a brilliant way to circumvent this prima donna demand and still make us lust for their goods).
Finally, all the good-guys involved, maybe even Mr. Stan Lee himself, seek to make amends to loyal Iron Man fans everywhere when a character casually tells us, "the rocket performed perfectly, it just landed on the wrong planet".