Pushing on with the MCU rewatch: today, Iron Man 3! I know it's a divisive movie, but I'm certainly a fan; it's a fantastic character study, a strong directorial statement and a fitting culmination to the trilogy, even if it sometimes fits a bit oddly into the broader universe.
MCU films get flak for prioritising a house style over director-driven visions; less so since Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler's efforts, but certainly in 2013. Even so, Iron Man 3 really rebuts that; it's 100% as much a Shane Black film as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Nice Guys.
And that was totally the right choice: I'm a big Jon Favreau fan, but Iron Man 2 showed this series was in need of a new but compatible perspective, and Iron Man 3 is that. The same sharp wit and motormouth dialogue, but a much more classically crafted approach to plotting.
It's the ideal choice to really lock Iron Man 3 back into being a tightly-focused character piece that really puts Tony Stark under the microscope, which Iron Man 2 tried to do before it got distracted in all the improvisation and chased itself down a cul-de-sac.
Iron Man 3 is at its best when examining the various tics and crutches Tony uses to hide his weaknesses and insecurities, before stripping them all away and forcing the character to re-adapt and grow past them. It's a well-worn arc, but performed with great panache and honesty.
The film isn't as good at writing Pepper, as the deconstruction of her relationship to the damsel-in-distress trope ends up putting her in that role to a much greater degree than the previous films, but on balance it's still a meaty part that gives Gwyneth Paltrow loads to play.
Like I say, I really enjoy the loose style of the first two, but it's also nice to see Downey Jr at the centre of a much more sharply constructed piece, with this level of attention paid to the evolving scene-by-scene mood shifts and character journey markers.
It helps that Black's action sense is so strong; I don't think there's any doubt that the setpieces of Iron Man 3 are the best of the trilogy, even though it's the movie with the fewest sequences where Tony is actually in the suit. That's no small feat.
On the downside, Iron Man 3 is where the MCU Villain Problem started to set in. Captain America was the first one where the stuff with the villains was markedly worse than the rest of the film, and Iron Man 3 solidified that into a trend affecting almost all the Phase Two movies.
I'm not super-familiar with the Extremis storyline from the comics, but the concept sounds much less stupid there than it is here. Gaining enhanced healing and physical function by hacking the body's repair centre sorta makes sense; gaining lava heat powers is irredeemably goofy.
Having Tony tangle with terrorists and people with advanced robot tech got a bit old by Iron Man 2, but trading them for these dumb-looking, nonsensical lava-skinned super-goons feels jarring, especially when the character work is taking itself relatively seriously.
And then the main villains... I mean, I've talked about this before, but the short version: yes, the Mandarin is dated, and it's cool to subvert him, but if you're going to pull a huge fake-out with your Big Bad, you'd better have an equally compelling threat to replace him.
As it is, Iron Man 3's villain goes big on smart deconstruction and thematic creativity, but does so at the expense of having a unique, interesting adversary on a basic surface level, and that's not a choice you should be forcing audiences to make in a superhero movie.
Still, the good stuff in Iron Man 3 outweighs the flaws by a considerable degree, and it comes to a neat, poignant conclusion for Tony Stark that feels like the impactful end of a cycle. So it's kind of a shame that the subsequent movies unpicked that conclusion so thoroughly!
Don't get me wrong; I think Tony continues to be used really well by the MCU, right through to Civil War and Spider-Man Homecoming, but it does seem odd for Marvel to get Shane Black to write a perfect sendoff for the character, when they had no intention of following it through.
I think that's Iron Man 3 is a nutshell: it's a really good, smart movie that works very well on its own and as a deconstruction of Iron Man the character, but sometimes its vision is so focused on its own goals that it doesn't always fit the broader expectations of an MCU movie.
It's the balance of writing for this universe: defer too much and you get a compromised film like Age of Ultron or Thor 2, but you can also chafe against continuity if you go as idiosyncratic as Iron Man 3 or Thor Ragnarok. That Guardians/Black Panther sweet spot is hard to hit.
If I'm honest, though, this stuff doesn't bother me when actually watching Iron Man 3; it'll never be the quintessential MCU movie, but it's hard to be too upset when it's giving such a smooth ride. Hard to argue with those end credits, either.
