After much deliberation, I finally decided to bite the bullet and watch this movie. If you've read some of my past posts, you probably know that at this point in time, my relationship with the superhero franchise is not great. Captain America, Thor, Iron Man 2, The Wolverine, The Incredible Hulk and The Avengers were all disappointments and I had all but given up on the comic book craze. That is until I gave this one a watch and found a bit of gleaming redemption amidst the rest of the overhyped series.
As convoluted as most of these films are getting, the plot of Iron Man 3 is fairly straight forward. This terrorist named Mandarin wants to shake things up here in little ol' America and he does so via a string of seemingly untraceable bombings. It isn't long before these get a little too personal for Tony Stark, who's been suffering from bouts of immobilizing panic attacks, when his chief of security, Happy, is seriously wounded in one such attack. The always cocky Tony Stark takes it upon himself to challenge this Mandarin guy by broadcasting a threat to him over the news and it's just all downhill from there.
I'd like just to make a quick note that I find it somewhat disturbing that some of the terrorist bombing stock footage used in the movie were real bombings where real people really died. Of course, you wouldn't know that unless you spent some amount of time on Liveleak thereby recognizing the videos, but it's still kind of a fucked up thing to do if you ask me.
In a classic, this-type-of-movie cliche, one of the early scenes exhibits Tony showing off some fancy new gadget. This particular trick allows each of the components of the suit operate independently to remotely locate Stark wherever he may be and form the suit right there on the spot. While that may sound like the most ominous deus ex machina in action film history, Iron Man 3 is thankfully above that and doesn't cop-out in the heat of the action. Also on the other side of the spectrum, it's nice to note that this trick wasn't tossed in to only be used in one or two scenes, it's actually fairly essential and sees implementation in several scenes.
One of the things that makes this particular installment excel way beyond the dismal Iron Man 2 is it's high entertainment value. Iron Man 2 was too dull, too simple and too stupid to live up to it's far superior predecessor and with only two rushed scenes featuring the main antagonist actually fighting, it was highly disappointing. This one has much more action and doesn't feel so much like a sequel for the sake of being a sequel. One sequence in particular has Stark trying to catch a bunch people who were just sucked out of a falling airplane. It feels like a classic superhero kind of situation and his solution to it is clever. I also enjoy watching Stark's in-the-moment problem solving, as he employs little foresight whenever in a tense situation and rather opts for whatever can fix the immediate danger that he's in (e.g. launching out of his suit to avoid an attack but not having given any thought about where he intends to land). Of course just straight action doesn't make a film and this one still does not quite live up to the original film which was more intelligent by comparison.
And of course there are things that bring this film down. As a trade off to the greater amount of action, it's unsurprising that much of it tends to be pretty over the top with too much CG, however, if you're coming off of The Avengers, it'd probably look like the fucking Bourne Identity. It also suffers from the same problem as The Wolverine, as it fails to make any substantial developments in the protagonist's character. Sure, there's some kind of visible change that we can see, but like The Wolverine, I don't feel like we needed an entire movie just to cover it.
It also has some pretty stupid moments in it like in one scene where a kid doesn't recognize Tony Stark but then shows him a newspaper that he happened to be holding that has Tony Stark's face on the front page. I noticed that on my first casual viewing so I get the feeling that this is one of those movies that's potentially riddled with little plot flubs like that (if you've ever seen the CinemaSins episode, you know what I'm talking about). And of course there's the glaring "Where are the Avengers" thing, which I guess is going to be an unspoken plot-hole for the rest of comic book movie history. On top of that, I find it kind of lame that anyone can just throw on a suit and become Iron Man; who the hell needs Tony Stark in that case? It kind of destroys the sanctity of the superhero if anyone can be him and, I know I'm not as well versed on my comic book knowledge as I used to be, but isn't it that glowing thing inside Tony's chest that powers the suit? So how can anyone else fly it?
Also pretty stupid is the fact that you'd have to be an idiot to not realize that a certain character becomes the main bad guy even though the movie sets it up to seem like he's just a nice dude. Finally, I think that the Christmas setting was a gimmicky idea that just shouldn't of been done, this isn't Die Hard, people.
Also notable of this film is that holy shit, this is the fifth highest fucking grossing film of all time. Yeah, with a budget of $200 million (which is actually not too insane for movies like this anymore), it made 1.2 billion dollars. As these comic book films become only more and more impossibly popular the rate at which they are made (and hopefully the quality but don't hold your breath) can only be expected to continue going up. So hopefully, for your own sake, you're not yet sick of these movies because there's no way in hell that they're going away anytime soon.
So Iron Man 3 is actually not too bad a film. It's redeeming over the rest of the superhero flicks that have been flying out of Hollywood faster than one can count. It's still no masterpiece but it's entertaining, good action and maybe even worth a watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment