An enjoyable movie but just not a good Iron Man movie.

Rating: 4/10 (26 October 2018)

Robert Downey Jr. saves this movie for me with his always amazing performance but the whole movie as a conclusion to the Iron Man trilogy is just really a giant disappointment.
It had a misleading first trailer with me thinking that this film was going to be a really epic conclusion showing Tony's house being blown up and the Mandarin's really cool lines some of which were not in the movie.
It makes me think that this was rushed in pre-production and the writers just made up the story as they went along with the annoying gimmicks like Aldrich Killian's infatuation with Pepper, the EXTREMIS virus which I don't think works in the same way as it did in the comics and also the big stupid plot twist that the Mandarin turned out to be an out-of-work, struggling stage actor.
I mean they were doing such a good job with casting Ben Kingsley to play the Mandarin (Iron Man's arch-nemesis in the comics) and then they completely wasted him, turning him into a punch-line when this should have been a more serious movie. They just decided to put that to one side and tell a story that was just really messy and while the ending was cool with Tony jumping in-and-out of his different Iron Man suits when activating the House Party Protocol, it is completely ruined by him blowing up his suits for no reason just to make Pepper happy when she herself starts to understand why Tony has always been addicted to making Iron Man suits.
On the whole, this film may be enjoyable to the regular theatre-goer which I think is what director Shane Black was going for but for fans of the comics, Marvel animated shows and the occasional video game (by the way LEGO Marvel Superheroes came out in the same year and yet they did the Mandarin justice, got him spot-on and even gave him a boss battle), this is definitely worth skipping unless you're doing a marathon of the ENTIRE Marvel Cinematic Universe.