Disappointed

Rating: 5/10 (2 July 2013)

***SPOILER ALERT***
For me this was the weakest of not only the Iron Man movies, but of all the recent Marvel tie-in movies. Also, let me say up front that I do not care about accuracy to the comic books, but I do care about consistency between the movies.
I'll start with the good:

The acting all around was good.

The CGI was excellent.

I liked the twist with the Mandarin and the possibilities with the media distorting reality. However, I can understand the whole Mardarin twist being a negative for many people as well, especially given the fact that magical-like power had already been established previously in Thor and the Avengers.

All of the references to the Avengers movie and the references to Iron-Man 1.

The realism of Tony dealing with PTS and working through his mental struggles.

The skydiving scene was very cool.

The bad:

Tony having the chest piece completely removed at the end of the movie. Whether or not you like Iron Man 2 or not, the fact is that it happened and much of the story in the movie revolved around Tony dying from Palladium poisoning, trying to find and alternative power source, all of Tony's reckless activities due to the idea of dying, discovering a new element to replace Palladium, etc. If he could just have a surgery and have the chest piece removed then most of that movie goes away. And, I had someone say that he was able to do it now because of the Extremis program. If that were true then that does not work either because he would not need a surgery at all if that were the case. Did all the Extremis people who got repeatedly shot need surgery to remove the bullets...no. So he shouldn't need a surgery either to remove shrapnel if Extremis was the answer, which the movie gives you no reason to think that was the case anyways.

Prior to this movie it was always made clear that the chest piece in Tony was powering his suit. They have completely ignored that fact in this movie. As a result for a lot of the movie his suit never reaches full charge and therefore is constantly in a weakened state, so he went backwards on his design. I understand that the new suit did need to have a certain level of internal power to allow it to fly to him and to allow it to suit him up, but beyond that is should have been powered by his chest piece as was established previously. I'm sure they did this to set up the ending for the removal of the chest piece, but come on. Again, another consistency issue.

As others have mentioned there is just not enough Iron Man.

All the controlling of the suit remotely. I actually liked the idea of him being able to control the suit with his thoughts, but they took it too far. There was already a lack of Iron Man in the movie, but on top of it most of the times when we did see Iron Man it was just the suit with Tony controlling remotely. This is ridiculous. A lot of the appeal of Iron Man is having the guy inside the suit. I really hope this does not become a trend for Iron Man going forward.

The craziness with Tony giving out his address on TV. Really? Because anyone and everyone who wanted to get his address couldn't find it out on their own without being told, especially terrorists who had the technology to block out the television airways and had the means to get into the President's cell phone.

Tony publicly announces that he is coming after the Mandarin to kill him after Happy is put in the hospital. Don't you think he would have gone home and made his suit battle ready as quickly as possible or change to a suit that was battle ready?

When they are being attacked by the helicopters at his house he had the suits that he could have called as he did at the end, but didn't...why? Oh yeah, because it would take away from the climax of the movie.

The little kid brought nothing to the movie and was totally unnecessary.

The Extremis group was taken too far with giving them super strength, breathing fire from their mouths, etc.

The Extremis research took years upon years to get sort of working, but still not perfect. Then Tony comes along when Pepper is the only one left and in the blink of an eye he can just fix her like it was nothing, effectively wiping out a major part of the movie like it never happened.

The climax with all the Iron Man suits seemed good at first, but it was taken too far over the top.

Too much humor. The previous movies with Iron Man (1,2, and Avengers) seemed to do the humor well with it coming across as natural. Iron Man 3 often times felt like forced humor for the sake of trying to get humor into a given situation.

In any case, this is my opinion on the movie. I just expected more from Iron Man 3.