Utterly disappointing

Rating: 7/10 (27 April 2013)

I just came back from the cinema where I've watched IM3 non 3D. I'll try to break it down as simple as I can in the following lines. Even now while typing this review I feel a void inside me regarding the movie. In one word - disappointing-.
INTRODUCTION I don't know if it was the trailer that created the wrong atmosphere or the fact that I'm a huge IM fan and I've been on every YouTube channel and every blog and every forum before the release of the movie watching , discussing commenting ... but this is not what I expected.
I expected to see IronMan vs. Mandarin the Asian arch-enemy as seen in the comic books. Turned out the Mandarin was a junky , lame , actor that someone picked up from the street to impersonate Mandarin so people have someone to blame for all the attacks. The worse way is the way it is revealed to the audience. I mean it was like watching BORAT for God's sake. Instead what I got is a personal walkthrough of Tony's life. His regrets , his weakenesses and some action.
STORYLINE Although I'm quite capable of keeping up with most movies (watched also Imaginarium of Dr.Parnasus and Inception etc) I must say I had a difficult time with this one. Scenes seemed to go randomly stitched together. As well as randomly paced, sometimes so fast that you needed some seconds to realize what just happened and sometimes deadly slow. The dialogues seemed very poorly made as well.
In this movie Tony has LOST almost all of his swag. RDJ tries to do his thing and succeeds up to a point as usual but I don't get the casual "Tony Feeling" of the 2 IMs before this one or the Avengers. Maybe it was a direction method to present him more vulnerable and shocked ("Nothing's been the same since New York") but I didn't like it. His jokes were cold and nearly as confident as the ones he used to make. The 2-3 clever things he said he seemed like something that "had to be done" rather a natural flow of conversation.
VISUAL EFFECTS & SCENE SETUP I must give them that one. CG artists , 2D/3D artists and VFX departments worked hard on that one. There was action. Of course it seemed disconnected at times (as I mentioned above) but there was some. The Visual Effects were taken care of but in comparison to the former movies AGAIN this is inferior. Although there were some cool things like suits , gadgets , gizmos etc. they didn't make much sense. It was as if they were put there just to satisfy the people that were waiting for them instead of being thought out carefully. There were moments that I couldn't understand if it's Tony in the suit , or the suit by itself and other times I couldn't figure out what he was trying to accomplish at his 3D-hologram computer. Generally intuition was gone for good.
THE ENDING All the above I could forgive. I could honestly say it was a descent movie, despite that it lets the audience down at some point, but I can't because of THAT ending. The ending the way it was made certainly made clear that there isn't going to be an IronMan 4 which I can partially understand (RDJ is growing older after all). To make a long story short Iron Man destroys ALL of his suits and has an operation in which doctors remove all his cluster-shrapnels from his chest and lives a happy life (BATMAN-style drinking wine at the end). So here we go. First , no more IronMan ... Second deriving from no.1 , no connection to The Avengers 2 (what are they going to do call him back or plant the reactor back in his chest for some reason?) and third that last scene totally defeated the whole purpose of IM2. I mean the guy was trying for a whole movie to find a replacement element instead of Paladium to put inside his arc- reactor so it won't kill him bit by bit. If he could just have an operation and take the shrapnels off then why not do it then and keep the first reactor?
CONCLUSION I wouldn't watch this movie again although I will because I have promised some friends and I can't take back my word , but if I could take back my word then I would consider myself luck since I would have saved thrown away money. It's an acceptable conclusive-movie for this trilogy , to watch at home in Blu-Ray with your friends but not cinema material. My original vote is a 6/10 but I'll give it a 7 in honor of RDJ.