The best Iron Man, but…

MANILA, Philippines - Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is back in Malibu, obsessively crafting flashier features for the Iron Man. The Chitauri attack on New York has left him slightly off-balance, wearing down his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). So Iron Man 3 begins, with director Shane Black deftly planting the seeds of conflict deeper, wider and darker than we’ve yet seen.

Suffice it to say, it includes a malfunctioning Iron Man suit that may attack the innocent, some romantic competition in Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), and the ghost of a girlfriend past (Rebecca Hall). Plus, the world is being terrorized by The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). His bag of tricks includes explosions without bombs and insane hacking capabilities that allow him to override TV broadcasts and manipulate the President’s smartphone. He takes particular interest in our hero: Stark’s genius may yet hold the key to a breakthrough technology called the Extremis which The Mandarin intends to use to take over the world. All he needs is a bargaining chip big enough to get Tony to bend to his wishes.

The Mandarin could be the most frightening villain since Heath Ledger’s Joker — because really, The Mandarin is a symbol, and symbols are unassailable. Act One ends with a fatigued Tony dragging a lifeless suit across the snow, far from home or help. The elements are in place and the stage is set — and then it drifts into “ordinary-ness.”

The movie takes a more somber tone than the previous two, but not much is done with the dramatic tension so well built at the start. They prove to be false starts — teasing, building suspense in one direction, then dropping that plotline in favor of routine bang-and-bust sequences. The Mandarin stages a sinister plan involving physical and emotional torture — then something explodes, and he’s back to bashing heads. He murders hundreds of innocents on a whim, but conveniently gives  Rhodey an almighty kick in the gut for refusing to cooperate.

The Mandarin backstory from the original comic is left unused, and the character suffers as a result. His motivations are unclear. His acts of terrorism fall short of his grandiose threats. The direction gradually becomes heavy-handed, with Kingsley’s surprising turn lacking the subtlety of better storytellers like Christopher Nolan.

Downey lends a vulnerability to Tony Stark that we had not seen in the previous films. He dominates the screen, but the script obliges him to make ill-timed wisecracks that undermine the gravity of each situation. The movie leaves its characters underdeveloped and its talented cast severely underutilized.

Still, it delivers enough memorable action: The monkeys-in-a-barrel-style save in free fall, the unveiling of Stark’s awesome “basement activity” that is sure to make Iron Man fans gush and gasp, plus a scene with Pepper Potts kicking butt in a sports bra.

As the first Marvel film to come out since The Avengers, Iron Man 3 has the distinct luxury of drawing from the wealth of previous films — anything is possible in a world where gods, aliens and hulks co-exist. But it is punctuated by too many unanswered questions, especially about its denouement.

It is a competent film — entertaining, occasionally funny and surprising. But when you think about it after (and you will), it feels lazy, hurried, as if the writers and director were on a deadline and didn’t have enough time to properly clean up the mess they had made. It is the best Iron Man film in its attempt to reach further than its predecessors, in the scale of its ambition and the menace of its villain. But sadly, that’s all it does: Reach, but not quite grasp. Its fatal flaw lies in that it could have been so much more.

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