This third installment in the series (four if you count The Avengers, of which more later) is directed by renowned Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black, who delivers a tautly-plotted story with most of the the action limited to large set-piece sequences, such as the helicopter attack on Tony Stark’s clifftop home that has featured heavily in trailers for the movie.
In fact, one of the distinguishing features of Iron Man 3 is that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) spends very little time in the Iron Man suit.
The studio execs may be understandably wary of hiding their expensive main star inside a fancy tin man suit – at the most showing only his face, plastered inside the Iron Man helmet by CGI.
So for this movie, a much more visible Tony Stark spends most of his time working on Iron Man drones and a new modular suit which, for various plot reasons, often leaves him fighting only half-dressed: in one of the better scenes he fights off a team of bad guys wearing just one suit glove and one rocket-powered leg.
However, just about every other character gets a turn in the full suit for this movie, even for just a few minutes, including Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the kidnapped President of the United States.
Tony Stark has been having a hard time when we join him at the start of Iron Man 3 – dealing with post-traumatic stress from the events of The Avengers, which on one hand is quite understandable, but on the other makes you wonder how he coped with the embarrassment of Iron Man 2.
He’s now retired as a crime fighter, leaving the busting of bad guys to his friend Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) in the War Machine suit, now repainted in red, white, and blue, and dubbed the “Iron Patriot”.
But the bad guys have other plans, and Stark is drawn back into action by a series of suspicious bomb attacks blamed on a terrorist named “The Mandarin” – a sinister cross between the Unabomber and Osama bin Laden, played with evident relish by Ben Kingsley.
Stark challenges the Mandarin to kill him – and in response the helicopter attack on Stark’s cliffside mansion sends it crashing into the sea, and Stark along with it. He resurfaces with only one damaged Iron Man suit to play with, and sets about taking his revenge on the Mandarin.
Here the movie takes a standard detour in super-hero stories: how tough are they without their superpowers?
Stark spends much of the middle of the movie running away from the Mandarin’s henchman, who are somehow also linked to a smarmy scientist-villain played by Guy Pearce. With the help of a young fan (Ty Simpkins) he rebuilds his broken suit, overcomes his anxiety attacks with a little home-spun wisdom, and gets back to work.
The action sequences are spectacular when they happen, but director Black has clearly made a decision to suppress some of the action in favour of highlighting the story.
This may come as a relief to people who don’t really like action movies, but in the long run it’s hard to see how it will please those who do. It’s questionable, for example, whether action fans will prove keen to follow Tony Stark’s adolescent on-and-off relationship with Pepper Potts, for however many sequels there are still to come.
Although a tag-line at the end of Iron Man 3 announces that Robert Downey Jr will return for the next Iron Man movie, the producers have stated they’re keen to continue the series with other actors, if necessary.
But right now the main star is the best thing about these movies, and its hard to imagine that the franchise could survive without him – in or out of his metal suit.
Three stars (out of five)
Director:
Shane Black
Stars:
Robert Downey Jr
Gwyneth Paltrow
Guy Pearce
Ben Kinglsey
Don Cheadle
Runs:
130 minutes