This movie caught me off guard. And not in a good way.

Rating: 6/10 (18 June 2013)

I'm going to go straight into it. The film explores the concept of "it's the man not the machine" so basically this is more of a Tony Stark film and less an iron man film. Which is a good thing we get to see that Tony start really is his own greatest weapon, or at least it's his intellect, his ability to create things from scratch and think quick out of grim situation. Yes there is of course some good iron man action but the depth of this movie revolves around Tony, he is now dealing with PTSD(post traumatic stress disorder) so that is affecting his relationship with pepper and what not. So the film did have some strong elements, but here come the bad ones, the comedy relief took away from the tone that the movie was trying to set up and i had a really hard time taking the movie seriously which annoyed me, I would have liked to have seen another iron man and war machine team up but the result of them being together felt abit more like some buddy cop film, and thats nothing against buddy cop films i love rush hour, lethal weapon etc, but the tone felt way off. Let me talk about the twist now, i probably should do a separate review just based on the twist but i'll just spit it out here and now. First off i didn't like it at all for several reasons, if i go into all the details this review will become too long for anyone to want to read. I will just say I am a comic fan and have waited a long time for the mandarin to be brought to the big screen ever since his reference in the first Iron man film. I also felt disappointed to know all the hype during the marketing and trailers turned out to be pretty much a lie. I felt the character portrayal by Ben Kingsley was working just fine and would have loved to see how the movie would play out if he was the actual central villain and not some fictional persona created by Guy Pearce's character. I didn't mind that he didn't have 10 power rings and all that i understand changes and reinterpretations need to be made for the sake of incorporating this character to a more realistic cinematic universe. But i found what they did went waaaay beyond that and it was unnecessary. Guy Pearce to me was not the mandarin, he had nothing in common with the character in the comics and i felt the director was like" well...lets not the leave the film completely mandarinless" so they had Guy pearce shout out " I AM the mandarin" near the end which to me was if anything metaphoric and only technical. Yea the twist was unexpected but so was the twist in the film" The Village" just because a twist surprises you doesn't always mean it should be done. In this case it may have worked but in my opinion they simply didn't do it right and that ruined the film for me. Also his armors breaking all the time got repetitive and annoying at times, it took away from the significance of the other two films and also diminishes that sense of uniqueness, after all he is supposed to be the INVINCIBLE iron man. I get they wanted to show Tony stark as being more vulnerable, but they already did when exploring his other issues as mentioned before in my review. All in all i guess it was alright but in a fans perspective i would give this movie a much lower rating and I feel this movie more or less disregards the fans, and as a fan no matter how hard i try to like this movie it's just so damn difficult.