Iron Man 3
Today is May 3rd, and 10 years ago today, Iron Man 3 came out.
I have an interesting relationship with this movie. While a lot of people have issues with some of the recent Phase Four content of the MCU, and even the beginning of Phase Five, for me, being the weird fellow that I am, there was only one movie that ever really, 100% disappointed me MCU wise, and that was this film.
And yet, despite that, there’s still a lot I like about this film, but that’s mainly due to there really only being one point about it that I don’t care for, and that led to Iron Man 3 becoming the only MCU film I ever hated. Recently, that changed a little, but I’ll get into that later.
Iron Man 3 takes place just after The Avengers (which I wrote about in this post here), and Tony Stark is dealing with the aftermath of the Battle of New York, where he was pushed to the limit fighting an Alien Invasion, culminating with him personally flying a nuke into the portal that was allowing the Chitauri to invade Earth, destroying the army’s entry point. He only barely survived this, and as we see in one of the film’s earliest scenes, while he’s considered a big hero, he’s also a damn mess.
Wrong question to ask kid.
So yeah, Tony is kinda messed up…more than usual. In addition to that, he has to deal with the Mandarin, a long-time foe of his in the comics, reimagined as a more traditional Terrorist….kind of. We’ll get into that later. Anyway, When Tony’s friend, Happy Hogan, played by Jon Favreau is caught up in one of the Mandarin’s attacks. Tony makes a…not too bright move of giving the Mandarin his address.
It goes well if you call your entire house being blown up going well. Because of this decision, Tony is actually forced to spend a good amount of time out of the suit, having to improvise against opponents with superhuman abilities. I kinda like this detail. Back in the second movie, he said that he was one with the suit. He essentially stated that it was a part of him. The argument Tony made at that time was that it was more than just the tech that made Tony Iron Man. I feel like he spends a lot of this movie proving that, showing the ingenuity that allowed him to be a hero when he wore the suit.
This brings me to one of my favourite scenes in the movie: rescuing the passengers of Air Force One when they are falling out of the plane:
You can bet these guys were at the funeral in Endgame.
So, now it’s time to get to the Mandarin. This was the part of the movie that made me hate it. The twist they tried to pull in the movie, wherein the person we thought was the Mandarin was only an actor named Trevor Slattery (played by Sir Ben Kingsley) kinda wrecked it for me. They were trying to remove a lot of the issues about the character from the comics, but from where I stand it fell flat.
Even the reveal that another character was the “real” Mandarin didn’t mean much. It means so little that I’m not even going to put up a picture of him, or bother to give his name (he was played by Guy Pearce, that’s all he’s getting), and as such, even though there were a lot of things I liked about Iron Man, it was probably the only MCU film I hated.
This has changed recently: The recent movie Shang Chi and the Ten Rings re-introduced the concept of the Mandarin, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, as the father of the titular Shang-Chi, played by Simu Liu. They also re-introduce Trevor Slattery, revealing that he was captured by the real Mandarin sometime after the events of Iron Man 3. Leung’s Mandarin (known as Wen-Wu) is a massive improvement on the character, and Trevor is actually pretty entertaining in Shang Chi.
After that, I was able to enjoy Iron Man 3, if only because I knew there was more to the Mandarin than what the movie presented. I’d have loved to see the version of him from Shang Chi go up against Tony, entirely due to how he’s a completely different foe from what Stark had faced to date. I can imagine a few still aren’t fans though, and that’s more than fair enough. I will never tell you to like something. I’m mostly doing this to tell you what I like.
Iron Man 3 would have a limited effect on the overall MCU story. It’s the last solo Iron Man story, and it ends with Tony destroying all his suits, removing his Arc Reactor and seemingly retiring as Iron Man. This does not stop him from appearing again in Avengers: Age of Ultron, with a new army of automated Iron Man suits, based on the House Party Protocol he uses in this movie (sorry, I forgot to mention that).
He also continues to use a lot of the tech he used in this suit, where he can control parts of his suit mentally, in a continued evolution of his technology as the MCU continued to grow. While he ends the third movie in a good place in-universe, things are going to take a darker turn for Tony soon enough, and he’ll need to fall very far before he builds himself up again.
But we’re not there. Not yet.
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