Review: 'Iron Man 3'

Welcome to my review for 'Iron Man 3', or as Tony Stark puts it, 'A Few Tricks and a Cheesy One-Liner'. That's the Tony Stark personality we know, and that's the Tony Stark you get in this movie, but with at least a few new features. That's not including his suit and gadgetry.

I know I'm almost a week late with this, but what can I say? I'm not saying I'm not a fan of Iron Man, because I am. I'm just not the biggest fan, to put it mildly. It's almost pointless for me to talk about this film because, odds are, almost half the world's seen it by now. But I wouldn't be writing this now if I didn't have something to say about it.

In a nutshell, I did enjoy the movie. I liked it almost as much as the first movie, which I thought was a good flick. I also liked this one a lot more than the second movie, which was exciting but just too goofy. This is one of those "three-quels" that doesn't suck. The things I liked about it were that they at least tried to make this cocky, ego-maniacal character... less of a cocky, ego-maniacal character. The thing is, this is supposed to take place after the events that occurred in 'The Avengers', and Tony is experiencing some fairly severe incidents of anxiety/panic attacks. Most likely, these anxiety attacks are subject of his experience in New York.

SPOILER ALERT: The sad thing, for me, is these anxiety attacks in the film really don't have a decent resolution. Each attack keeps building up to something that you expect to be big, and it never happens. They're just simply shrugged to the side. Just giving a character a flaw isn't enough to pass as a relatable characteristic, you need a purpose for it and a reason for him to overcome that weakness. It's like saying Bruce Wayne decided to become Batman because he was just bored one day and wanted to fight criminals. Not very engaging. At least, that's what I thought.

I was expecting the sort of 'rise and fall, and rise again' story from this movie. You do get that a little bit, but it's not as emphasized as it should have been. I do think that the villain was decent. It might even be the best villain in the Iron Man series, and I'll leave it at that.

The rest of the movie, it's just your basic action/adventure flick. But thankfully, it's a fun one. It's not on the same level of cleverness and fun as 'The Avengers' was, but it was still fun.

My rating: 3 / 4