It's a fine, entertaining movie, with some solid acting from pretty much everyone.
Iron Man 3 is a strange movie, though, a Frankenstein monster which seems to be made of the best parts of several different action films which don't quite fit together: superhero movies, spy movies, buddy cop movies, comedies, and I think it's only through the magic of Robert Downey Jr. performance that the whole thing holds together.
I saw it last night and this is pretty much how I felt.
I almost had the impression that Downey's agent wrote as much of the film as Black did. it seemed like every beat of the film [and the ending itself] was an excuse to get Downey out of the suit as much as possible so that "the star" was on camera and not the Iron Man character from the comics. Most of, if not all, of the big Iron Man action sequences consisted of Tony remotely controlling the suits or jumping in and out of them every ten seconds. The remainder of the action was either Stark running around like a wannabe SHIELD agent or the supporting characters getting their contractually mandated "moment of glory" (and given Pepper the Extremis virus was like weaponizing a piece of wet lettuce).
In these respects, it was less of an Iron Man movie and more of "Robert Downey Jr and Shane Black do 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' in the Marvel U."
In addition, while the plot moved breezily along, if you thought about it for more than two seconds at a stretch, it collapsed:
So, apparently, having the shrapnel in his heart was elective the whole time? If so, the blood poisoning in the second movie makes absolutely no sense.
I suppose it is possible that, once he fixed "extremis," he used that to cure the heart problem. However, this begs the question, why not fix it before Pepper got infected?
Yes, Killian was evil. However, here Stark knows that the virus has an unexpected side effect that makes it even more dangerous to civilians. It sometimes accidentally blows up people in public. Fixing it would have hampered the whole combustion issue that was getting people killed and, if anything, made Killian's plans less, not more, dangerous.
Then there was the sequence where he taunts the Mandarin publicly and then gets his house blowed up. Why didn't the house have better security?
Tony Stark has been publicly outed as Iron Man for approximately five years now. Besides being a superhero, he's a brilliant scientist who tinkers with weaponizable gadgets constantly and somehow connected to SHIELD. He's been publicly attacked several times as a result, including in IM2. His first mission in IM was blowing up a terror cell. This is a man who has painted a target on his own back multiple times, a man who designs the best defense tech in the Marvel U (even if he-ahem-no longer allows it be used for military purposes [except when he does])....and he doesn't have his house set to to protect against weapons as conventional as helicopters and rocket launchers?
Again, while a nice set piece it seemed as if it was there simply to set up a reason to get Downey out of costume for the middle third of the film.
Then it's just a question of which is cheaper: paying RDJ to be on-set, or paying the VFX vendors for all that work.
