Ironman 3

It’s that time of the year again, where we get Hollywood’s laziest efforts to entertain us in the forms of  The A Team Redux,  The Smurfs : The Reckoning, and Rocky 5…thousand. As a result, our minds are slowly melting and we get closer and closer to a mental state where we will eventually buy the Lazy-E Boy/toilet chair that you can masturbate in for entertainment. “Go away, I’m batin!” Well thankfully Ironman is past it’s Avengers set up phase and the producers decided to give a real action writer in Shane Black a chance at not only the script but also directing. Black wrote Lethal Weapon 1 and 2, The Last Boy Scout, and Long Kiss Goodnight. Plus he also wrote and directed one of my favorite films in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang which starred Robert Downey Jr and fat Val Kilmer aka Gay Perry. Had he stopped being lazy and lost 25 lbs, Kilmer might have played the role of Aldrich Killian; instead of the low rent but still good Australian(born in England) version of him in Guy Pearce. 

Black is known for his buddy cop movies which are full of sharp wit and funny one liners that usually involve an interracial duo. And his stories are complex enough to keep you guessing as to who done it the entire time but simple enough to where it won’t go over the general public’s head. In this installment of Ironman, he picks up soon after the alien invasion in Avengers almost took out the entire planet. And just like in Ghostbusters 2, the public blames the hero (in this case Ironman) for what happened, so T. Stark basically is forced to stay in his basement and tinker with his toys while Pepper (Paltrow) runs his company. But initially, the movie flashes back to the year 1999 when at a convention, Stark is too busy hooking up with a revolutionary botanist (Rebecca Hall)to pay too much attention to the undiscovered nerd genius Killian (Pearce) who is desperately trying to get his attention. So naturally in a night where he’s simply trying to get laid, he ends up making a few enemies.But in typical Black fashion the story isnt quite that simple. There is someone else that is grabbing your attention at the moment and it is a man that is terrorizing the public and threatening the President of the United States with his random bombings in The Mandarin played by Ben Kingsley.  Well one of the Mandarin’s bombs puts Stark’s friend in a coma and this leads to a direct challenge from Stark to his latest nemesis. And the movie goes from there.

What’s cool about this movie is it’s basically Lethal Weapon with a big CGI budget.  While there are plenty of explosions and a cool new trick where Stark has magnetized himself so that he can throw on his suit from anywhere, Black also shows you another side of Stark who is dealing with anxiety attacks from the craziness that happened just a few months ago. So you get all the goodness of the action you’d expect but along with that an actual police procedural with some character development as well. The big CGI battle at the end is a little over the top and silly but seeing the result of a what a weapons genius can do with months of alone time made it bearable.  The scene where Ironman has to try and save everyone from a plane crash is probably the one that will stick with you the longest ala  Ironman finallytaking out the terrorists in part 1. 

In the end this movie is a little better than the usual popcorn fluff you always get in May and it actually appears as if they tried. The bad guys are kind of cool, Don Cheadle isn’t annoying in this installment, and the jokes don’t make you feel like you’re watching a post Dumb and Dumber Jim Carrey movie. The only real complaints I have is that they try and make a gangly Gweneth Paltrow seem sexy by putting her A cups in a sports bra and the fact that they didn’t have a scene with Ben Kigsley where he yells “They F you in the drive through! They F you in the drive through! They know that you're gonna be halfway home before you realize you got F'ed” I rate this fun movie as FRESH!