Iron Man 3
*SPOILERS!!!*Okay, now that that's out of the way...
I'd planned on going to the midnight premiere with a buddy, but I had no idea at the time that I'd be doing so after a 14 hour workday of backbreaking manual labor. So I zonked out after about the first 20 minutes and mostly only caught a minute or two of each quiet interlude following a loud action scene before passing back out. So, yeah, FAIL for me! And that's NOT a bad review of the movie, btw. It's just a really GOOD review of the Glenlivet we were drinking during the previews, lol.
So I was REALLY excited to finally see the movie "again" yesterday. Even though I managed to catch some MAJOR spoilers the first time around, I had no idea what happened for probably about 85% of the movie and was really curious about how they tied it all together and wrapped it up. From Tony storming the Mandarin's palace to the end credits was just a complete blank for me, so I basically had no clue wtf happened in the movie beyond the beginning and a few brief fragments of the middle.
Finally saw the whole thing, though.
CAN'T WAIT TO GO AGAIN!
The movie was GREAT. Very, very entertaining.
I guess a lot of people are bugged about Shane Black basically turning it into one of his buddy-cop movies and Tony being out of the suit so much and the Mandarin's big reveal, but personally I thought all that stuff was fuckin' awesome.
So I guess now I have to defend each.
The in-joke homage/motifs that Shane Black wrote in kicked ass. It was pretty easy to see RDJ/Cheadle as Gibson/Glover through most of their back-and-forths. Which I thought was truly inspired, with the Iron Patriot basically being the black lawman who's trying to help straighten out the white PTSD-afflicted loose cannon, who's constantly giving his buddy shit, just like Murtaugh and Riggs in Lethal Weapon. LOVE IT. We even had a scene with a Christmas tree lot, reminiscent of Riggs' epic introduction in his coke-bust scene. Also reminiscent of the whole Christmas thing in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Last Action Hero, and The Last Boy Scout, for that matter! And speaking of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang...oh, look. RDJ loses a finger again! Well, sort of. But don't worry, he can put it back on, lol.
Not to mention the destruction of Stark's mansion! It took me a minute to realize why it was so familiar, but then it hit me. Michael Hunsaker from Lethal Weapon! Yeah, right when our protagonist is about to unravel the whole thing and find out what's really going on...NOPE. Helicopter assault on a beachfront/cliff-face mansion instead!
Hahaha, good stuff. None of which takes away from the movie, of course. You either notice it or you don't. If anything it improves the movie by making it play to his strengths as a writer/director, and I thought it was really cool to put a comic book movie like Iron Man 3 in such good cinematic company. Whether you like his stuff or not, he indisputably made Iron Man 3 a Shane Black movie, which is something of a feat in and of itself. And he did so rather subtly, really.
And why NOT have Tony out of the suit so much? All it does is hide RDJ's awesomeness and they did a GREAT job of making Tony-out-of-his-suit absolutely central to the story, so it made perfect sense. And, of course, there are obvious comparisons to be made between that aspect of THIS movie versus that aspect of The Dark Knight Rises -- especially with both being big, superhero, tentpole sequel Summer movies featuring red herring, terrorist villains -- but since they BOTH dealt with billionaire industrialists as protagonists and handled it so differently I don't really feel like its an issue. (Tony actually having a "Clean Slate" program and explicitly calling it that was maybe laying it on a bit thick and rather unfortunate after Selina Kyle dealt so much with it last Summer, but oh well.) Plus, keeping Tony out of the suit made for some KILLER action setpieces that might not have been so interesting otherwise. The choreography and suit-hopping of the movie's climax is justification enough, really. That shit was AMAZING! I wasn't sure how well Shane Black would handle the more action-oriented CGI stuff, but damn. No complaints here!
And then there's the Mandarin. He was ALWAYS a manufactured "Yellow Peril" villain anyway so I guess I didn't really see it as much of a switch and just thought of it as a brilliant modernization of the same concept. And tying all that into the whole video-savvy-bin-Laden/war-for-oil/amputee-vets/crooked-VP/Roxxon/BP-Gulf-spill/etc. thing was pretty sweet, topical, and ballsy, too.
And, speaking of the Vice President, as an '80s action movie fan I was silently cheering on the presence of Miguel Ferrar as the Veep. They didn't really give him too much to do, but c'mon! He's back in the field of man-in-robosuit movies! Sure, I'd rather he were in next year's RoboCop remake instead, but either way it's a WIN.
On the subject of men-in-robosuits, I also thought it was pretty cool to see the President of the United States in the Iron Patriot armor, lol. Nice little wink-and-nod to the whole thing from the comics, where the Iron Patriot is really President Norman Osborne, formerly the Green Goblin. And of course it was cool of them to make the President's name be Ellis, after Warren Ellis, the sci-fi mastermind behind the "Extremis" storyline from the Iron Man comics. I know Marvel owns all that stuff and they didn't HAVE to give him credit, but considering that the first and third films of this trilogy drew SO MUCH from that one storyline, it's only fair.
All in all, I thought this movie wrapped up the trilogy really well. Taking us back to Switzerland during the opening to meet the guy who saved Tony's life in captivity and to see Tony blowing him off was a nice little treat which really helped bring things full-circle, just like the closing credits montage using footage from all three films. Definitely a sense of completion and closure there. Which naturally doubles nicely as a negotiation tool for RDJ to make another hundred million or so in exchange for The Avengers II now that his contract is over and the trilogy is complete, but whatever. He's worth it. I hope we'll continue to see more of Pepper Potts, too! Seeing her kick ass as Iron Potts or w/e was fantastic. Never been too big a fan of Paltrow's movies, but she's been GREAT in these. Hopefully they'll keep finding excuses to get her on film in her cutoffs and underwear too, lol. Mmm.
My only real disappointment with Iron Man 3 was the complete lack of AC/DC and Black Sabbath. WTF. Not even a t-shirt, ffs? They were clearly trying to tie things up in a neat little bow, but NOT using ANY music from those two bands totally drops the ball on that point. Anyone know what's up with that? Marvel Studios being cheap again? Shane Black just hates classic rock? Opportunistic band reps shitting the bed? Had to be something going on there, that music is pretty much part of the Iron Man brand by now.
Oh, and the end-credits scene.
Minimalist and goofy and kind of a letdown since it doesn't really lead anywhere and wasn't even as funny as the shwarma scene to make up for it, but it was still cool. Ruffalo and all the double-entendres MORE than make up for it, lol. Banner doesn't have the "temperament," and Tony-minus-the-ARC-reactor says he just had to "get that off my chest and put that out there."
Haha, nice.
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Originally Posted by Hazekiah
