Iron Man 3 Review

Shane Black does what Black does. This is a Christmas movie about a damaged man with a gun and a smart mouth, wandering a small snowy town with a kid sidekick, and for a long stretch in the middle it is the loosest and funniest film in the franchise because Tony Stark has no suit and has to think his way out. The panic attacks give Downey something to play beyond charm, and the midair rescue of a plane's worth of falling passengers, a human chain assembled at terminal velocity, is the best pure action beat in the trilogy.

The Mandarin reveal is real writing, turning a villain into a critique of manufactured terror and letting Ben Kingsley run riot as a drunk stage actor, and the fandom's outrage does not make it a worse idea. Where the film fails is where all three do: the finale is a swarm of empty suits fighting glowing men on a dock at night, indistinguishable and endless, and Guy Pearce's Killian is not remotely interesting enough to close on. The destruction of the Malibu house is the last time this series felt dangerous.