The film opens to a young Tony Stark in full playboy mode, with a long-haired, goatee wearing Happy Hogan. A pre-Iron Man Tony partying it up on New Year’s Eve. The year is 1999, Tony’s flirting and partying with Dr. Maya Hansen (actor Rebecca Hall), who is working on the Extremis project, pioneering accelerated genetic regeneration. Stark’s also having a ball picking on geeky Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) who’s trying to fund a new think tank called A.I.M. To his best effort, Killian ends up being played by Tony. An innocent action, but an action that can be summed up as Tony is young and made a mistake. Aldrich Killian didn’t see it that way. To Killian, it’s an action that defines him and will come back to bite our iron knight some time later in his life. I have to say, I do love the way A.I.M is introduced in the film. It brought me back to the first Iron Man movie, when agent Phil Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. was introduced to the world and tried to set up an appointment with Stark after his escape from the 10 rings. It was nostalgic. Fast forward to present day. After the apocalyptic events of “The Avengers,” Stark is a nervous wreck. He can’t sleep and stays up all night, ignoring girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and inventing new iron suit prototypes.
Tony loses himself in his work while Pepper runs Stark Enterprise but watching the news won’t help. A new global terrorist emerges, a Osama bin Laden like terrorist called the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley, really great) is busy broadcasting videos and making pronouncements like, “Some people call me a terrorist. I call myself a teacher. America, are you ready for another lesson?” The Mandarin threatens the President of the United States and detonates bombs across America and threatening more. Meanwhile Killian shows up at Pepper’s office, where he tries to interest her in “Extremis,” a sort of regeneration project that he considers a step up in evolution, but Pepper isn’t buying what Killian is selling.
Tony maintains a distance until events become more personal. Things go off the rails as Happy (Jon Favreau) is injured during the Mandarin’s most recent attack. Stark flips and publicly calls out the Mandarin and the Mandarin answers, leading to the destruction and devastation of Tony’s Malibu mansion. Iron Man escapes to rural Tennessee, where he is helped by an 8-year-old boy (Ty Simpkins) which is one of the highlights of the movie. This scene could not have work without Downey Jr. In fact the movie is full of buddy moments, Tony with Happy, Rhodes, and Tony with his new Iron man suit. It’s an unexpected sequel, one that isn’t afraid to change things up. Some of the plot falls apart a bit when you examine it too closely. Like the fact that Pepper, Rhodes, Tony, henchman, all have the same exact body type and size, hence they can all fit into Tony’s Iron Men suits. Also, you’re telling me Tony can remove the shrapnel from his chest by surgical procedure anytime he wants?
IRON MAN 3 delivers on all the fun as the original does. Marvel, is carefully building up to something in AVENGERS 2 and IRON MAN 3 is a good start to Phase 2 but what they did with the Mandarin is dangerous and can hurt all of Phase 2 if they don’t pull this off. Fans of the Mandarin are going to be pissed. I know I was. A universe is created that has characters like Odin, Loki, and Thanos, and they couldn’t pull off the Mandarin. They made him into a joke. There was a scene where the actor that played the Mandarin comes out of the bathroom after taking a shit and asks which one of you girls is Vanessa. To Tony’s amazement and us, the audience, this is how the real Mandarin is revealed to the world. To us geeks, the Mandarin is the archenemy of Iron Man. His Joker, his Green Goblin, his Lex Luthor and this is how they treat him. If you don’t understand what that means let me give you a brief history of the Mandarin.
He was born in China before the Communist revolution, to a wealthy Chinese father and an English aristocratic mother, both of whom died when he was very young. The future Mandarin was raised by his resentful Aunt following his parents’ deaths, and as an adult he used his brilliance and family wealth to attain prominence in the Kuomintang Party’s reign over China. The Communist Revolution of 1949 cost him his position and power, although the population he had once commanded still regarded him with mystic awe. Years later, he ventured into the mysterious Valley of Spirits, where he discovered old wreckage of a starship of the reptilian Kakaranatharian, an extraterrestrial race, and the ten mighty rings which had powered the vessel. Unaware that the Makluans themselves remained at large, posing as humans, the Mandarin spent decades mastering Makluan technology, then several years more conquering the valley’s adjacent villages and establishing a network both of citadels and of loyal followers. In recent years, the Mandarin became the patron of the Sin Cong revolutionary Wong Chu, who abducted the Chinese genius Ho Yinsen and American industrialist Tony Stark. However, Yinsen sacrificed his life to enable Stark to escape and overwhelm Wong Chu’s forces using his first Iron Man armor. After disciplining Wong Chu for his failure, the Mandarin had the opportunity to stop Iron Man from departing but, intrigued, allowed him to pass unharmed, little realizing the armored hero would become his greatest threat.
Later, Iron Man visited China to investigate the Mandarin for the U.S. government. Using the rings and his own combat skills, the Mandarin nearly defeated Iron Man, who nonetheless outwitted him and escaped. Soon after, the pair again clashed when the Mandarin pulled Stark surveillance missiles from the sky to use for his own purposes, then manipulated the Chinese government into test firing a missile which, unknown to them, was intended to trigger a world war, but Iron Man defeated him both times. With a rich history this far back Marvel has now turned the Mandarin into a gag, a punchline. The Mandarin in the movie is a caricature, played by an actor manipulated by Aldrich Killian to sell the Extremis project to the world and it feels like a cop-out.
In the Marvel Universe the “Iron Man” movies have become the thinking person’s superhero franchise if for no other reason than that they feature the thinking person’s movie star. Yet when it came time to rethink one of Iron Man’s greatest nemesis for film, they took the easy way out and just used his name. Still IRON MAN 3 delivers on the fun. Some of the plot falls apart a bit, but it’s a solid film. It gets a better grade than most of the movies of its kind. It’s an Iron Man 3 movie that in the words of the fake nonexistent Mandarin, “You’ll never see it coming.”
Your beloved Raphie