A lukewarm mess

Rating: 3/10 (12 May 2013)

What is wrong with IM3? For a start, Iron Man is hardly in it. Shane Black, who wrote Lethal Weapon, of which/who I am no great fan, directs this one, and maybe was pressured to have more Downey Jr face-time or maybe he just wanted to do another Lethal Weapon movie. Or doesn't know how to do a super-hero movie, because this isn't really one. The film is probably a little better and smarter than Lethal Weapon, and has better action and acting (good acting all round is what saves the movie) and a movie where Stark has to survive on his wits without his armour MIGHT have been cool - but ultimately this is an Iron Man movie, I want Iron Man thanks. I want an incredible flying tech-suit, not Tony Stark with a gun.
And when Iron Man is in it, Tony Stark is not in it. In the armour I mean. All the suits are remote controlled, or drones controlled by Jarvis, and that's boring. He's not in jeopardy if he's doing by remote in the back of a van somewhere, get it? And the slightly-tough-to- swallow idea that Iron Man can press a button and all his armour flies to him and wraps around him, seen in Avengers, is here taken to a newer, even less believable level. At the end he's falling from suit into suit and then that suit is chopped in half (by people with very hot hands - wait, I thought Thor's lightning barely scratched it - here the suits are shredded like paper) so he jumps into another suit that wraps around him... and it's all blurry like Transformers action sequences so you don't know what's going on. At one point it seems his leg is cut off, but apparently it wasn't, so like whatever.
Some plot holes/stupid stuff/spoilers -
Stark tells The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley out of Gandhi) his address on live TV, hoping he will attack him. He does with a bunch of helicopters shooting missiles and destroying Stark's home/base. This nearly kills everyone there, because Tony hasn't prepared for an attack at all. He could have had 30 Iron Men hidden around the nearby hills, underwater, whatever, and trapped/killed the attackers as they approached. He could've even called up SHIELD, seeing as this was national security, but SHIELD aren't in the movie. He could've made sure Pepper wasn't at home, but she nearly dies because he didn't think of planning any defence at all.
He is supposed to be the smartest guy in the room at any time. Rarely in the movie was he shown to be very smart... Waking up in Tennessee, his suit broken, he must survive upon his wits, befriending a kid and trying to fix his suit with a car battery. Was every suit put out of action when his home was attacked? If so he's an idiot for keeping them all there. He has a place in NY, remember? No suits there? He could get one to him in five minutes.
Big Spoiler! Mandarin isn't the Osama type terrorist mastermind we are led to believe, he's a silly, confused actor. What A Tweest! Ben Kinglsey makes it nearly work, but logically, would the real villainous mastermind entrust this role, integral to his taking over-the-presidency scheme to this clown? Unlikely.
To enable the Stark attack on the villain's lair to find the Mandarin, suddenly Stark is like Jason Bourne (or John 'Commando' Matrix, the 80's Scwharzenegger movie, actually referenced in the film - 'I'm gonna kill you first') and the outside guards are easily defeated. Yeah, sure.
But Stark is captured and chained to a bed, where he is brutally bummed by Guy Pearce. Not really. The villains, like they never do with James Bond, should shoot him in the head at this point, but of course do not.
I could go on. But I'm bored. I would mention that Pepper Potts is captured, and to goad Stark, instead of say, brutally bumming her, they inject her with the hot-fingers-explode-and-maybe-regenerate-super-serum. Which while painful, as we know, ends up giving you super-powers, so brilliant idea there.
The movie isn't dull. It's often funny (though some humour comes from a super-villain leaving a toilet smelly, and a very camp/gay man who has a crush on Tony ho ho not), but sometimes - often in fact - goes for funny when it would have been better to keep the action and suspense going.
As I've said, it's biggest flaw is that it barely has any scenes with Iron Man, Stark inside, flying, looking cool, kicking ass, blasting people, maybe a bit drunk. And with Stark/Downey, the clumsily handled 'post-traumatic stress disorder' idea (he saw aliens in New York and nearly died... could be interesting but it goes nowhere) means he is rarely the cocky, over-confident Mr Know-It-All that charmed people in the first movie. He is rarely even dressed well!
Oh and the bad guys can explode themselves and survive. At the end some are exploded, and the main baddie is hit with a bit of metal by Pepper Potts who has become a bit explode-y herself. And then I think she explodes him. It's a bit unclear as to who is dead and why they wouldn't be able to regenerate and perhaps a more imaginative way of defeating them could have been devised. It seems to come back to Shane Black, who like in Lethal Weapon, thinks all you need is an abandoned shipyard, a black guy with a gun and a white guy with a gun trading snappy one-liners and saying 'cover me!' and then everything exploding and there's your perfect ending.
My review - Boo!