I’m a casual fan of the Iron Man movies. I think they are grossly overhyped despite Robert Downey Jr. being a great Tony Stark. The films would be nothing without him.

Iron Man 3 fixes one of my biggest complaints with this series, the action scenes. They’ve all been teases until this movie. It’s like once something great was happening, the fight ended. Here, the action scenes last more than 35 seconds and are really satisfying. The plane rescue is a real knockout and they came up with some really wild in-suit, part-in/part-out suit action that was really inventive. Special FX remains top of the line ILM work, they make knock out stuff that integrates so well with practical work.

I real surprise for me was how little Iron Man is actually in this. It’s all Tony. He’s full bore IM for a small percentage of the movie. There’s a really great story arc for Stark here where he is suffering from PTSD from the events in Avengers He’s a real mess in the beginning. he goes through even more terrible stuff (which his ego asked for) and at the end he’s much more than a guy in a really expensive suit. He IS Iron Man.

Solid villain work here too (something IM 2 completely botched), with great set up, villainous follow through and a good amount of scenery chewing.

But there is a ton of suspend your disbelief logic and physics here. They acknowledge it at times, but it’s ridiculous. The same people that moan about Batman surviving huge falls and getting back to Gotham in a day better be crossing their arms at the nonsense pulled off here too. At one point the parts of his suit fly to Stark over 800 miles in maybe 2 minutes. That basically requires time travel to work. But I digress, it’s still a good movie and easily the best Iron Man.