Iron Man 3 Review

So months after Iron Man 3 came out in theaters, which I saw in IMAX 3D, we finally get the release of the summer blockbuster on DVD and Blu Ray several days ago. My hype for Iron Man 3 grew immensely after I saw the Avengers, I mean the first Iron Man movie introduced the origin of the metal-head to non-comic book readers and made him from a B-List character, to one of Marvel’s poster boys. Iron Man 2 was on the other end of the spectrum, where it just had too many stories to tell to hype up the Avengers, and even though it wasn’t as great as the first one, it was still entertaining to a certain extent. Now we’ve got the third entry in the franchise, and usually in the comic book superhero genre, the third movie is always the worst out of the 3. So is Iron Man 3 as good as the first, or does it fail just as bad, or even worse than the second film? So the story of the movie takes place about 6 months after the events of the Avengers, with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) who is suffering from PTSD after driving a nuke into a portal to deep space, and stopping the alien invasion. To cope with knowing that there are species of life outside of Earth, he builds over 40 Iron Man armors for just about every contingency he could think of. I felt like this was a great way to show how a great superhero/genius like Tony Stark copes with a situation of feeling tiny. For a guy who’s always been on the top of fame, wealth, and all the ladies, he’s really cracked down to secluding himself in his mansion, and being obsessed with creating more and more suits. As the movie goes on, we see the villain of our story, the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), a Middle Eastern terrorist who is obsessed with Chinese culture, and to bring America to its knees. The thing I love about the Mandarin is that he’s not exactly plotting his evil deeds in the actual movie, instead he likes to record himself doing mass acts of terror on video, and hacking into TV networks to show his misdeeds, mainly to bring fear to the American people. And without giving any spoilers, this “fear” plays into a bigger part later in the movie. So essentially after he can take no more, Tony Stark decides to give the Mandarin his home address in hopes to fight him head on, but is instead ambushed by helicopters full of guns and missiles which were disguised as news choppers, forcing him to suit up in the prototype of his latest Iron Man armor, which doesn’t go too well for him, although he does escape alive, and crash lands somewhere in the middle of the state of Tennessee. Throughout the movie Tony has to overcome the challenges of the whole nation, including his girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), believing he is dead, his best friend James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) taking on the mantle of the rebranded Iron Patriot, fighting against Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and his super-soldier serum knock off Extremis, and finding out the real mystery behind the Mandarin’s antics. So the movie does definitely delivers in the sense that the story is solid without giving too much mention to the Avengers, it gives Tony Stark a new arch for his character to go in, and creates a controversial twist over a certain character. Iron Man 3 however doesn’t do a lot of explaining for things from the comics, like the Extremis serum, which left a lot of unanswered questions in people’s minds. But other than that Iron Man 3 is a really fun movie which has a great balance of being dark, while at the same time being comical. There were some things that left a lot of people sore after watching the movie, but it’s what made me enjoy the movie even more, and with that being said, I’m giving Iron Man 3 an 8.5/10.