Let's start with the fact that none of the characters develop. Tony Stark has a humorous version of PTSD and he kind of half resolves it at the end of the movie while giving up the suit but not really. Rhodes has a funny name for his suit. Happy is rendered comatose for being semi-competent for once and there is a joke about how he likes soap operas. All new characters are murdered immediately.
Pepper Potts takes a break from being the mortal woman who is actually on top of things to embody multiple bad cliches about women in movies, mainly ones that involve her being gullible, petty, bewildered by hot men, and a hostage - oh, sorry, a "trophy". She is also gifted superpowers - temporarily, of course! - twice. The first time it's almost charming.
NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS MOVIE THAT IS RELEVANT TO ANYTHING. Tony Stark narrates.
He also makes a lot of bombs out of Christmas tree ornaments and tasers out of wool mittens. Because it's Christmas? Why is it Christmas?
After using a bunch of these homespun gadgets to disable guards - well, violently kill them, actually, including dropping an explosive on one who is drowning unconscious in a fountain - he picks up one of their guns and immediately begins to favor it as it is a more useful weapon than anything he brought.
Tony. At that point you could have just bought a gun. You were in a cliched version of Tennessee, after all.
A lot of things happened in this movie! I remember them very well because they happened in other movies first. There's the jumping off of tall things into a suit of armor gig from the Avengers. That happened between six and eleven hundred times. There's the whole bit where Rhodes has his suit commandeered again. Pepper Potts prominently displays her abs for no reason a bunch. And despite rumors to the contrary there's an awful lot of "Tony is not at full power so he can't fight the bad guy well" going on.
Actually that is the entire movie, including the climax, when eight hundred reject suits are flying around in dull circles being torn apart by super soldiers while Tony mumbles their nicknames. Tony personally loses several of these really awful suits to a single terrible villain before having the rest explode into tiny fireworks. The Mark 42, sort of the hallmark "this is me" suit, falls apart so many times that it is actually only interesting as a collection of pieces. None of the suits do anything new, and WHY ARE NONE OF THEM POWERED BY TONY STARKS HEART NOW. THAT WAS A BIG DEAL, REMEMBER. But it's cool, I guess, because Tony Stark can now charge his suits off of a car battery in ten minutes, or the electrical grid of Tennessee in three days. When you can do that, who needs the upgraded Arc Reactor conveniently located in his chest?
There is an exceptional amount of work that goes into protecting the Mandarin gag, leaving no clues as to what is going to happen at the midpoint. There is absolutely no work done to make the rest of the plot interesting. Everything else is foreshadowed in painful red letters half an hour in advance and is boring, predictable, and trite.
Which is weird, because the string of logic required to believe it requires you to bend over backwards to follow it. Like, the Mandarin is an elaborate hoax to cover up failed science experiments by making them into terrorist attacks? Because Homeland Security is less scary than the peer review board. Oh also they're going to kill the president so that the Vice President will BE MARGINALLY MORE FRIENDLY TO THEIR PROJECT. One would hope their plan also includes some supreme court justices, a large majority of congressmen, and, oh yeah. SHIELD. Who have, I guess, more important things to do than protect the President of the United States from a terrorist threat that can hack the entirety of television for reasons that are not remotely explained?
Seriously, how did they manage that? The villains are members of a think tank so stupid that they are operating off of a table napkin scrawl Tony Stark wrote while nursing a hangover 13 years ago that wasn't in his particular field of study and they still can't get their tech right. The lead villain demonstrated his intelligence through a 3-D projection of his brain but, seeing as it had no relevance to the plot and also didn't look like a brain, I find it more plausible that this was actually also an elaborate hoax, albeit an unimpressive one. How about that bit where he pointed to the hole in his brain that would allow him to be smarter but that he hadn't figured out how to fill yet? That was pretty bland. Also, why was he wearing a purple plaid suit? And why did Pepper gasp and flutter at the sight of a man in a purple plaid suit?
How does being really hot regenerate flesh? Why is the process addictive? Why is the side effect that you explode? Why does the villain kill the person who makes him not explode? How do temperatures that can melt metal fail to hurt people in metal suits? Why do the two folks holding Iron Mans hand not lose their limbs when he suddenly brakes at terminal velocities? How'd they get the metal out of Tony's chest? WHY IS HALF OF THIS MOVIE SET IN TENNESSEE?
Never mind, though, right? Action! Lots of action, most of it not great, but including a big finale involving a large variety of complicated metal objects flying around in ways that are difficult for the eyes to track and oh goddammit.
I didn't hate this so much due to the raw strength of the material it was built on, but no amount of charm can save this movie from being awful. Bruce Banner had the right idea in falling asleep.
