My son treated me to an early birthday present by getting me tickets to the Iron Man Marathon, prelude to Iron Man 3. Yeah, I’m a geek. Even won a poster and a cell phone sticker answering some trivia questions during the shows. And it was quite the pleasure seeing, in Imax 3D, Iron Man 1-2, then the Avengers, which is the Greatest Movie of All Time, and then, and then! the much anticipated, much ballyhooed, Iron Man 3…
What. The. Hell?
Iron Man 3 is a big fat middle finger directed at comic book fans across the world. It just is. It looks like Shane Black, during the production meeting, said, “You want a comic book movie? I’ll give you a comic book movie. I’ll stuff it with every single stupid comic book thing I can think of. Those comic book people are too dumb to know a good movie anyway, so we’ll make billions!”
And he was true to his word, because this was bait-and-switch at its most cynical. You probably think the Mandarin is in this movie. He ain’t. You might even think A.I.M. is in it. They’re not. And you might even expect Tony Stark to, get this, actually be Iron Man in it. But, he’s not. And, oh yeah, there’s another Iron Man called Iron Patriot and that’s War Machine, but uh, uh; uh uh, it’s noooooot!
Big fat middle finger.
Best I can figure from the incomprehensible plot, some lava people are going around exploding and some guy is A.I.M but isn’t; is, instead, the King of the Lava People and blames some actor for the explosions so it’s terrorism, man, not my Lava People formula causing people to randomly explode. And Tony Stark has PTSD.
Got it?
No mention, anywhere, of possible threads to the Avengers’ upcoming Thanos battle: no Ten Rings, no Infinity Gauntlet, not even, as my son pointed out, S.H.I.E.L.D.
Just a great big fat middle finger, America.
Disappointing.
🙂