Iron Man 3 - none of this makes sense

As with a lot of the films I end up blogging about on here, I sometimes wonder why I bothered watching them.  Iron Man 3 came out in May this year and was definitely one of those films I had no intention of paying nearly £10 to see.  The character of Iron Man is on the surface a very interesting one.  The man underneath the suit is Tony Stark, a one-time weapons mogul who got kidnapped by enemies of America and managed to escape after forging a powerful suit from bits left lying around their cave - a bit like MacGyver I guess.  When he realises that a war wound threatening to critically damage his heart can be kept at bay by a device that also powers his suit, man and machine merge to create Iron Man.  He subsequently decides that his time as an arms dealer has only been a force for evil and chaos in the world, and resolves to reform.

That's what happens in the first film anyway.  By the time the second one comes around Iron Man has to hit Mickey Rourke a lot of times because he has the audacity to declare that the Iron Man suit has created an end to war.  But what they were really doing was setting up Avengers Assemble by introducing Scarlet Johansson and Samue L Jackson as yet more characters in the Marvel universe.  With Iron Man 3 though the film looks like it isn't even setting up a sequel.  It's a film that feels like it only has half a script with characters that are hardly fleshed out.  Avengers Assemble has come and gone and I'm left wondering why they made the film.  Apart from money of course.

The plot holes are rife in Iron Man 3.  There is very little reason for anything in the film to occur.  Tony Stark ends up going after the 'big bad' Mandarin, but he only does it because his slightly douchey security guard accidentally gets himself involved in an explosion.  But that's just the start.  The film spends ages referencing things that happened in Avengers Assemble rather than actually telling a new story.  It carries on as if the memory of Martians invading New York in that film has only caused an incurable psychological rift in Tony Stark's mind as opposed to the collective mind of the whole of Humanity.

The one saving grace at all in the film is Ben Kingsley's exceptionally entertaining performance at the Mandarin.  It's a good job he's in there chewing the scenery up as Guy Pearce is utterly terrible in his role as the arms dealer who's trying too hard to be like Tony Stark used to be, plus Rebecca Hall is totally wasted - all she does is stand around being doe-eyed for most of the film before getting rather unfairly shot out of hand.

Now I'm not a Marvel fanboy, and so I don't know if Marvel fanboys love all this stuff.  What I do know is that I don't care about Marvel building a massive universe in which to spam out endless bland franchise movies about their characters.  If this is what Marvel suerhero movies are going to turn into in the near future then I'm afraid I'm going to lose interest pretty quickly.  Thankfully the resolution to this film indicates that we might not be seeing much more of Iron Man in the future.  And if you're worried that's a spoiler - don't be.  I've probably just saved you from watching a pointless car crash of a movie.