The Curse of 3
I've held my tongue for as long as I could. This blog doesn't have a huge audience but for those of you that do read this, I wanted to give you all a chance to come to your own judgement; I wanted you to see with your own eyes and assess for yourselves whether or not a travesty had occurred. And it did.
Iron Man 3 sucked! Ok. Wait. I take that back. It was a great movie due to Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow. Great chemistry together, those two. And, Sir Ben Kingsley is always a wonder to behold no matter what his role.
That being said, the movie while starting out strong, fizzled into nothingness the moment some genius screenplay writer decided to pull a "bait & switch" nearing the end of the movie. For those of you that know what I'm talking about...THE MANDARIN WASN'T THE VILLAIN IN THE MOVIE!!! Oh sure, you can make an argument that Guy Pearce's character (Aldrich Killian) was the puppet master pulling the strings the entire time and that he was the Mandarin but if you do, I and any comic fan of Iron Man, will punch you in the face!
Sir Ben Kingsley played a magnificently terrifying Mandarin right up until the part of the movie where Tony Stark, sans his Iron Man suit but equally just as dangerous due to his genius intellect (One of the better things about the movie, by the way) discovered the Mandarin was merely an actor playing the character of a terrorist. (WHAT? DAFUQ!) At which time, Ben Kingsley began playing the awesome character of a drunken, drug-addled, washed up actor who needed the money. The character turned comical and the exchange between Downey Jr. and Kingsley was hilarious! So much so, in fact that it was an awesome sugar coating to the jagged pill we, the fans, had to swallow. Not the fans of the franchise or the movie. The comic book-buying fans. The reason the theaters get filled in the first place when these blockbusters come out.
For those of you that don't know, the Mandarin is in fact a villain in the Marvel Universe. Tony Stark/Iron Man's arch nemesis, if you will. He's a bonafide bad guy with 10 rings of power that I was dying to see in action.I was wondering what the CGI battle was going to look like and I was actually happy they didn't show so much in the trailers. I can't have been the only one that felt this way. He was technically in the movie but he was a ruse; a red herring. In the end, he was just a con and we all fell for it hook, line and sinker!
***SPOILER ALERT***
Iron Man 3 sucked! Ok. Wait. I take that back. It was a great movie due to Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow. Great chemistry together, those two. And, Sir Ben Kingsley is always a wonder to behold no matter what his role.
That being said, the movie while starting out strong, fizzled into nothingness the moment some genius screenplay writer decided to pull a "bait & switch" nearing the end of the movie. For those of you that know what I'm talking about...THE MANDARIN WASN'T THE VILLAIN IN THE MOVIE!!! Oh sure, you can make an argument that Guy Pearce's character (Aldrich Killian) was the puppet master pulling the strings the entire time and that he was the Mandarin but if you do, I and any comic fan of Iron Man, will punch you in the face!
Sir Ben Kingsley played a magnificently terrifying Mandarin right up until the part of the movie where Tony Stark, sans his Iron Man suit but equally just as dangerous due to his genius intellect (One of the better things about the movie, by the way) discovered the Mandarin was merely an actor playing the character of a terrorist. (WHAT? DAFUQ!) At which time, Ben Kingsley began playing the awesome character of a drunken, drug-addled, washed up actor who needed the money. The character turned comical and the exchange between Downey Jr. and Kingsley was hilarious! So much so, in fact that it was an awesome sugar coating to the jagged pill we, the fans, had to swallow. Not the fans of the franchise or the movie. The comic book-buying fans. The reason the theaters get filled in the first place when these blockbusters come out.
For those of you that don't know, the Mandarin is in fact a villain in the Marvel Universe. Tony Stark/Iron Man's arch nemesis, if you will. He's a bonafide bad guy with 10 rings of power that I was dying to see in action.I was wondering what the CGI battle was going to look like and I was actually happy they didn't show so much in the trailers. I can't have been the only one that felt this way. He was technically in the movie but he was a ruse; a red herring. In the end, he was just a con and we all fell for it hook, line and sinker!
No Mandarin. No Mandarin in an Iron Man movie?!
The Mandarin! THE MOTHERFUCKIN' MANDARIN!!
That's like having no Green Goblin in a Spider Man movie. No! It's worse. That would have been the equivalent of Christopher Nolan filming the The Dark Knight and halfway through, having the Joker character been a fake and the mastermind was the Penguin all along. (Although, we have to give props to Shane Black for, at the very least, not having the audacity of retiring the superhero the way Nolan did with Batman in The Dark Knight Rises.) The Mandarin character in the movie was down right creepy and unrelenting. It was building up speed slowly with significant force and then, in what has to be the mother of all theatrical slight of hand movements, he was swept under the rug. A tremendous bait and switch but an unnecessary one!
What is it about the third installment? Why do directors and producers just lose focus of what they originally started? Why do the actors sometimes phone it in? I mean, sometimes, it doesn't matter. Sometimes you're going to pay the money to watch the movie so you can close out the trilogy but why isn't the last one epic? Iron Man 3; The Dark Knight Rises; Ocean's 13; Aliens 3; Matrix: Revolutions; T3, for crying out loud! Add your own because I'm certain I've left lots of them out. UGH! It just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I know it's hard to make a movie and twice as hard to duplicate the success of the first so by the time the third hits the theaters, I'm not expecting much. However, when it comes to superhero movies that are basically stories that have already been written and have proven they are popular, why don't these writers, directors, producers and screenplay writers read these comics and say, "Hey! I like this story. Let's just make a movie about this story without changing a thing."
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