I watched Iron Man 3 again to see if I felt different about it, since I was so conflicted when I saw it in the theater. I still feel the same way. I liked it, but the problems are pretty huge. And unlike Iron Man 1 and 2, I don't see myself revisiting it again.
The primary problem here is that the movie is overstuffed. It does the Mandarin, terrorists, Extremis, a subplot about Tony Stark having PTSD, Tony having to be out of the suit on his own for a while, and a kid that Tony befriends. I think it's odd that this movie was directed by Shane Black, who is known for good writing. And yet the primary problems here are structural script issues.
Rebecca Hall may be attractive, but she is not the level of woman that Tony Stark would pursue as much as we see at the beginning of the movie.
There is also the issue with the over the top nerdy performance by Guy Pierce in the 1999 segment. For fuck sake, Dr. Insano is less goofy than this, and this is a big budget serious blockbuster theatrical movie! Had they just up and hired Spoony instead for this part, it would have given it more credibility than Guy Pierce does here.
I don't buy that he can't sleep. He could have any medication he wanted. He knows he doesn't think as clearly when tired. He's driven, but not stupid.
He didn't get post-traumatic stress after the events in Afghanistan, which left him with a fucking HOLE IN HIS CHEST! Then I don't buy that he has post-traumatic stress over a situation (admittedly wierd as hell and unprecedented) that he WON! That, and the PTSD is oddly enough both a major plot point, and then just dropped later in the movie. The only part of the "I must protect Pepper" aspect of that which I liked was that he had a preprogrammed option for the suit to go to protect Pepper. Which I thought was believable thing for Tony to do.
The Mandarin's accent...what the hell is that supposed to be?! Watching it a second time and even knowing he's an actor, I still don't know what he's trying to go for.
Aside from the stupid move of prodding the Mandarin directly and giving his home address...why doesn't Tony's house have a zillion onlookers around it the very next day? In fact now that I think of it...why does Tony have to give his address to anybody? His house is HUGE and out in the open on the coast. Doesn't everybody know where Tony Stark lives?
While I am a fan of the comics and I should be offended at the changes to the Mandarin, I'm not. The movie tried something different, and I can appreciate that effort. But I'm not even sure exactly what they tried to do. It feels like it just fizzles out, and then the charater that we already knew was a villain...is the villain. And the one thing that is clever with the villain, is that Killian wanted us to think he was the bad guy, so he cast Ben Kingsley. That's kinda hilarious in a meta sort of way.
For a villain that uses people as bombs to avoid detection, he sure chose a an obvious (and rather inefficient way of attacking Tony Stark's home. Also, SLOWEST MISSILE EVER.
Also, at that point in the story, why would The Mandarin care about Tony's idle threats anyway? Yeah, later we know it's Killian and why he has a beef with Stark. But even in that case, the threat Tony made on TV wouldn't matter to him.
By all rights, the middle part of the movie with the kid and TOny outside the suit SHOULDN'T work. Like how people complain about the lack of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises (and justifyably so). But it's amazing how well it works here. The child actor is pretty good. But more importantly, I actually like this kid character. He's pretty well written (within reason). But most importantly since we like seeing Robert Downey Jr. act as Tony Stark, it brings out more of that. Making this part of the film just as much fun as some of the action sequences.
The sequence where he saves the people "barrel of monkey" style is stupid. While I like the idea of Tony having to solve problems he can't deal with brute force style...yeah, their arms should have been ripped out of their sockets.
I liked the end fight where he is jumping in and out of various suits. There were only a few times when it was overly complicated and hard to tell what was going on. I liked seeing Pepper give a chance to be badass. Although it would have been a little more "empowering" had she not been wearing just a sports bra and shorts. And apparently her newfound powers are just handwaved away "oh, and I fixed her, she's normal now" in the surgery bit at the end.
There is no excuse why he blows up MILLIONS of dollars worth of suits at the end, just so they can have pretty fireworks. Watching it again I think the idea was supposed to be that he is giving them up to concentrate on Pepper. But I don't buy he would ever do that in such a wasteful manner. Or that she is that shallow.
I also find the end where he has surgery to take the shrapnel out of his chest. If they had even given a single sentence reason why he hadn't been able to do that before I might have given the movie some benefit of the doubt. But otherwise it's just really frustrating.