watched it last night. Wasted my money imo. Almost as bad as IM2 but with a worse villain(s?).
I don´t know what ppl are talking about when they say “promising trilogy”, IM2 was mediocre or just decent at best. IF this woulda turned out at least good, then the trilogy would have been worth buying. As it stands, IM is the only movie form the series I can see myself rewatching in the future.
BTW, I didn´t mind the Killian/Mandarin twist that much, ok maybe the nerd inside me yelled “they ruined THE IronMan nemesis” but to be honest it wasn´t such a bad decision in itself. As other ppl pointed out, there are bigger flaws that make this a forgettable movie. Such a shame cuz I expected it to open the summer.
Now I´m hoping Man of Steel doesn´t suck (it doesn´t look like it´s gonna but you never know).
I think all the villains in the Iron Man series are kinda’ weak.
Elias was probably the most developed one but was the weakest final fight. He does the usual villain dialog shtick when he should have have just killed him then and there. It was an okay final battle but it’s not the greatest either.
Mickey Rourke/Russian Dude/Whiplash had the best motivation by far (classic comic book villain motivation) and I found his desire to humiliate Stark and undercut him by getting his technology out there to be interesting. Final battle was just too short and was like a nerfed Dragon Ball Z battle.
Mandaran just not that big of a threat. All he had to do was get some real space between the two of them and blast his head off. Problem solved. It was though the filmmakers kept thinking of excuses as to why Tony couldn’t get like 20 feet away and shoot him.
I’ve said it before, IM (Comics) has never had a titular villain. He doesn’t have a Joker, he doesn’t have a Magneto, he doens’t even have a Venom (I guess War Machine shrug), there is no Sabertooth, No Doom - etc. To ‘me’ IM is more ‘self-villainy’ if I can create a term here…playing hero while battling self demons or being at war with ideals more so than “Living Laser”. Granted that changes in an Avengers, but stand alone the ‘casual’ fan such as myself couldn’t pull a villain to make it epic by default. To paint another parallel - again as a casual fan - the Extremis storyline is a condensed version of “Death of Superman”, “Funeral”, and “Rebirth”…and you can do a movie eventually that involves Doomsday wrecking SHOP and people will know who he is to a degree. The same thing can be said of Bane and Knightfall. For Ironman…the guy who killed him and ultimately lead to his transformation…was Mallen.
Really…
So I’m with you that the villains may feel weak, but I wouldn’t expect more than that, and instead would expect the focus to drift less on them and more on alcohol, or women, or the hole in his chest…which the series did in various ways/capacities. Let’s be 100 about it. The first movie shouldn’t be about a strong villain, it should be about “becoming Ironman” - which it did. The second movie should be about showcasing his strength as he’s grown into the role, and his weaknesses…it showed his weaknesses - very well I might add, but did a piss poor job of showing his strength as the fighting - while memorable - lacked anything that would make IM seem ‘epic’ short of the ‘big blast’ - and struggling to beat a guy with a whip when you have guns is NOT a good showcasing of strength I might add. Assuming its a trilogy (which I think most of us do - with a possible future installment YEARS away) - the third movie should bring closure to the character, and should bring the hero full circle. This movie did that. It doesn’t need a strong villain for that at all. The first movie was strong in innovation, and that’s what he did through out this one.
Really, on par with IM2? IM3 was on par with IM1, maybe even surpassing it. Only complaint is the minor dragging out of things, but otherwise if you didn’t like this then I’m not sure what you were looking for (less character development perhaps?)
@Unreallystic I agree for the most part but I think the personal demons angle is very underused. 1 was about establishing yourself and taking on responsibility. 2 was more about daddy issues rather than alcoholism and it kinda’ wasn’t resolved very well. I guess 3 was about relationships and being human. But I guess I’m just irked that they never really had him get over his alcoholism.
No, instead they took what I feel was a PC way about it and shifted it from alcohol to ‘panic attacks’. It’s more tragic and less…meh…it cast him in a ‘less immature’ light…that works. And technically speaking, lack of sleep - result of the panic attacks - creates a state nearly identical to being drunk. And honestly, the time table for this movie was very condensed. His friend gets blown up, half a day later his house gets blown up, a few hours after that he’s in another state, and within a day he’s fixed his suit and found Mandarin, and by that evening he was fighting Killian. So there wasn’t much time or setup for him to hit the bottle, let alone ‘beat it’. It was essentially 48 hours heh.
According to school, all conflicts in all works of fiction boil down to three essential conflict types: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. self.
It’s a little difficult to pull off “man vs. self” in film, especially in an adventure story, which is why a self-sabotaging fuck like Tony Stark still gets a villain shoehorned into each movie whether it really needs one or not. It’s much easier to dramatize a physical conflict, especially if the other guy has a similar power set or tech or whatever.
Worded MUCH better than I could put together at the time hehe, The villains are there as a necessity more so than to show case a villain. The irony though is most villains worth showcasing still boil down to man vs self as they are typically either a mirror or mirror-flip of the hero hence their clash. Its why one day Magneto is fighting the Xmen and the next he’s leading them.
Superman definitely embodies that ideal. His villains either hate/hate-on him for the amount of power he has, or have his level of power and wonder why he’s not conquering weaker beings left-and-right (so they try to do it themselves).
I still don’t know why the creative minds behind Supes’ movies don’t realize this through other villains outside of Zod and Lex Luthor. Is it really that hard to use anyone else besides those two?
-Pepper Potts suddenly becoming a superhero[ine] and ultimately saving the day
-Tony Stark the movie with special guest appearances by Iron Man
-Mandarin…>_<
-When did Tony’s suits start being made out of recycled Coke cans?
-The kid
Peoples opinion of why something sucked doesnt need to be refuted or validated. Thats why he thought it sucked, thats why I thought it sucked. Those are all valid opinions. You can try to rationalize why maybe these werent negatives in your eyes if youre really trying to like the movie but to most detractors they were enough to write of the movie completely and rightfully so.
That’s actually a hazy area. If you didn’t like the movie, then that’s your honest experience and nobody can take that away. But the evidence you cite to back up that opinion is fair game for examination. It doesn’t mean your opinion is wrong, but maybe the reason you felt the way you did isn’t quite what you think. Sometimes we discuss movies to better understand our own experience as much as everyone else’s.
For example, I thought I saw disaster coming when they introduced the kid, but it was enough of a subversion of that usual cliche that I ended up not minding. Some people might treat the inclusion of the kid as a no-no, full stop, which in my view is putting the cart before the horse–deciding whether the idea is good or bad based on a pre-existing principle rather than how well the movie handled it. Some things are cliches for a reason; they can be applied well or not well. Iron Man 3 treated it in a fairly unsentimental way, which I enjoyed.
^^ lol on everything except DKR. I thought it was the weakest of the three nolan batflicks, but it was still pretty decent and made for a Good trilogy overall.
Didn’t mind the Catwoman/bane thing also. Catwoman’s scene felt a lot less forced for one, unlike Ms.Potts, “I’m suddenly a super ninja” at the last minute.
Because Supes 2 made Zod popular and Lex is the ‘iconic’ villain. I couldn’t name 5 Superman bad guys off the top of my head, Lex, Bizarro, Doomsday, ugh not the Tick…purple enrgy absorbing guy though…meh (while later in post edit - Brainiac!). Now I’m no expert and don’t pretend to be, but that puts me in the casual fan that a movie is going to pander to group. Slight derail, part of the reason Batman’s fragility is such a good thing - he has numerous villains who can ‘get on his level’ or who can realistically ‘put him in harms way’…while Superman could wipe out most of his foes in a blink if he felt so obliged - its his morals that make him a target. So for a Superman movie to feature a different villain? I dunno. It would be nice, but to paint a sense of true despair - it would need a Bane like appeal…mass destruction and the ability to at least stand ground with Superman…so it would literally take a combination of villains like a Brainiac and Doomsday to build the suspense. shrug
I agree with most your ideas, but you are dead wrong here. There’s no question about it, and it’s the very reason why Ben 10 is like 30 times more popular among kids than Iron Man these days. Not to mention shit like Teen Titans, what a piece of shit of a cartoon - in every sense.
The real question here is “do they really need to jeopardize quality so much so as to cater to bigger audiences”?* This goes for movies just like it goes for fighting games, BTW.
*extra question: could young kids see the movie in the US? Around here, it was rated teens, which makes it even more stupid to have that little kid there.