This is not Iron Man, nor is it the Marvel universe.

Rating: 4/10 (25 April 2013)

First of all, I would like to say that I have been an IMDb user for 4 years and 4 months now and this is going to be my first movie review, which makes me kind of sad because it is not going to be a very positive one.
This movie starts off with a very good promise, a promise also given to us in the trailer. It was supposed to introduce Iron Man's toughest villain 'The Mandarin', show us the state our world was left in after the events in 'The Avengers' and develop the Iron Man characters, that we've come to love so very much, even further. Instead Shane Black and Drew Pierce decided to make a ridicule of the true Mandarin character from the comic book and gave us an uninteresting villain, almost altogether ignored the consequences of the Avengers movie (that should be an important issue at this point) except for some hinted psychological issues Tony has, that weren't developed at all just like all of the side characters that seemed to exist just because they were there in the prequels.
But the biggest issue were the so obvious plot holes that defy all the logic set up by the prequels and 'The Avengers' which leads me to believe that the writer/director Shane Black and co-writer Drew Pierce didn't even see the afore mentioned movies before writing the script for 'Iron Man 3'. How can these 'enemies' melt the Iron man suit if Thor couldn't even scratch it with lightning which achieves much higher temperatures; how can the same people rip off parts of the Iron man suit if Thor barely dented it with his mighty hammer 'Mjolnir', ergo Thor is just a giant pus***; if it was so easy for Tony Stark to remove the shards from his blood stream why didn't he do it in the second Iron man movie when he was facing immediate and painful death from the exposure to palladium radiation, and so on...
As far as the acting goes, it was good but nothing spectacular.
The script wasn't very good. There were some funny one liners but by the end of the movie there were so many of them it just left a bad taste.
The action and the special effects were fine but didn't serve much purpose since the storyline was so illogical and uninteresting.
So in conclusion, this movie would be good if it were a stand alone SF movie, but since it is connected to all the marvel universe movies that came before it it simply isn't. It would seem that Shane Black and his crew couldn't find a way to deliver the promise given to us by the creators of the afore mentioned marvel films.
So if you must see this movie wait for the blue-ray because in my opinion it isn't worth the price of admission.
I give it a 4 out of 10 stars only out of respect for such great actors as Robert Downey Jr., Guy Pearce, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley and so on, which could have made it such a great movie with the right script in hand and the right director in the coaching seat.