Full of Inconsistency

Rating: 5/10 (19 June 2013)

I have loved the movies leading to the Avengers film. The original Iron Man (IM1) movie is one of my favorites. However, I was deeply disappointed by the third installment. It is easily the weakest of the three Iron Man films due to a large number of inconsistencies present within the story line and may prove to be the franchise's jump the shark moment.
I enjoyed Robert Downey Jr.'s character portrayal of Tony Stark. The character is executed in Downey's quirky, witty, and fun style that I find funny and entertaining. However, in this film we are lead to believe that after kicking an entire alien army's butt in the most awesome way in the Avengers movie, the character now has some type of anxiety disorder or PTSD. I assume that the writer's think that Tony has to have some type of internal conflict in each film, an aspect which made this movie hard to stomach.
The kidnapping and abuse of Tony at the hands of a terrorist organization in IM1 didn't give him PTSD; it drove him to create Iron Man. The near death experience of being slowly poisoned in IM2, didn't give him PTSD or anxiety. He was depressed, but chose to seize the day at every instance driving race cars, throwing parties, ensuring the survival of his company and the survival of the Iron Man Legacy through War Machine. In this film, which starts on the heels of the Avengers, after totally and completely dominating an enemy in the most glorious way possible, we have to try to believe that Tony again has an internal conflict. Right. Where is the character growth? Why is he not better for the experiences of his last three films? Then we are lead to believe that Tony, a man of genius intelligence, outed super hero, and developer of the most sophisticated weaponry on the planet is going to let his house get blown up by a couple of tiniest helicopters I've ever seen in a movie. The guy fought back a dozen advance alien flying machines in the Avenger's movie. Come on.
The inconsistencies go on and on and on, and get worse and worse as the movie progresses. Tony fights the whole movie in a prototype suit with no weapons, but later can remotely control 50 suits that he doesn't use until the last scene; at which point they are torn apart like the are made of paper. Really? The enemy in the last sequence couldn't fly and had to touch the suits to damage them... The logical question is why didn't the suits just shoot at the enemy from the air? I almost walked out. The whole thing was ridiculous.
Most egregiously, in the last five minutes of the film they re-write everything that happened to Pepper, Tony, and cast throughout the whole film and re-define Tony's back story from the previous films. I don't know why they chose to do so, but if they were going to, they should have done it in a much better way and spent more than 30 seconds explaining what happened. The end of the film was like watching a Saturday morning cartoon or hitting the reset button on a video game system (only worse).
All said, I'm disappointed and almost saddened by this film. It could have been so much better. Someone is going to have a hard time repairing the damage to the storyline caused by this film.