Avoided this for an extremely long time since I’ve always heard it was terrible and I’m not one for the MCU.
But there are only so many Shane Black / Robert Downey Jr / Guy Pearce movies that will ever exist. So I had to show up for this eventually.
It was pretty great!
Yes, it set the standard for the MCU ironic detachment tone. In other MCU movies it reads as unhinged psychopathy. Here, it is clearly grounded in trauma, a need for avoidance. Much to my surprise it works.
RDJ, Guy Pearce, and Ben Kingsley all know what kind of movie they are making and have a great time doing so. We get to see Tony Stark be more than just a rich guy in a suit. The fights were perhaps uninteresting but were at least surprisingly clear by MCU standards.
I didn’t have the issues with Act 3 that everyone else here seems to have. Perhaps because I was very tired of the Mandarin’s vaguely creepy ramblings and was ready for a vibe shift. Instead, I felt the movie shared the flaw of many other superhero movies – it was weakest when the heroes were piecing together the mystery of what’s going on. It’s incredibly basic and Tony basically unravels a giant conspiracy within 30 seconds of accessing a government computer, making his whole travelogue rather pointless.
But no one is here for that so the movie quickly loses interest in it too. They know the real reason everyone is watching - to see Tony Stark enter and exit an Iron Man suit roughly 500 times. Sometimes in pieces, sometimes the whole thing at once, really just about every variation on “guy puts on / takes off armor” that you can imagine.
