932. Iron Man 3 (2013)

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce

Director: Shane Black

Running Time: 130 mins

Iron Man 3 is an American film and the seventh film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After Tony Stark establishes himself as a true defender of world peace, he is threatened to be broken down by a formidable and mysterious terrorist called the Mandarin.

Well, by the third film in this series, the whole formula has got a little repetitive, and it’s not really managed to reinvent itself in a fresh, exciting way. Having said that, this film does still retain a lot of fun, whilst the performances and action sequences do keep improving on the previous two.

The main problem here is that the series has completely lost its amazing realism that it had in the first film and, to some degree, in the second. That lack of realism doesn’t make it a bad film in any way, but what it does do is make the characters and the plots less convincing and resultantly less engaging and exciting to follow along to.

Basically, the villains in this film are completely over-the-top, now with some weird supernatural twist put on them that puts this back into the format of a simple comic book movie, whilst the actors portraying them were also quite disappointing, with Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley putting in very average and unexciting shows as supposedly ‘formidable’ opponents.

What’s also bad about this film is that it really does follow the same formula as the first two films, and just doesn’t have much unpredictability or genuinely exciting drama throughout, due to the fact that you’ve already seen pretty much the exact same story twice before.

Despite all that, there’s still a lot of fun to be had in this film, and if it were the first film in the series, it would be a little stronger due to not being so clichéd. The dialogue is still pretty snappy, it still doesn’t feel at all PG-13, and the action is bigger and better than ever, which makes it a lot of fun to watch as a superhero spectacle.

Also, Robert Downey Jr. impresses once again with a fun performance as Tony Stark, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle and Jon Favreau all add to that entertainment in the supporting roles as they get even more involved in the action of the story, leaving this like more of a buddy action film than a properly intelligent and engrossing film that the first film was.

Overall, this gets a 7.2, because despite being clichéd and unrealistic, it’s still a fun film with good action and performances that will put a smile on your face any day of the week.