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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn the opening scenes of Iron Man 3, everybody's favorite billionaire snarkmeister, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), hasn't slept a wink in days. He can't stop tinkering with new Iron Man apps in his hi-tech workshop, even though his mania is really lousing up his sex life with fed-up longtime gal pal Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Off his game even as a gadgeteer\u2014the shit just keeps working wrong\u2014and prone to anxiety attacks, he hasn't been the same since he got back from New York.\n\nMeaning, of course, since the mayhem-happy climax of The Avengers, something the dialogue never does spell out. Everybody on-screen is as up to speed as we are on last summer's battle royale, making for a few good jokes along the way about the Marvelverse's power-chord heavy meta. But the news that Mr. Defense Mechanism himself (get it?) is suffering from the emotional fallout of the whole gang's duel with Loki is your first tip-off to what an interesting movie Iron Man 3 is.\n\nNaturally, the script\u2014co-written by this installment's director, Shane Black, with Drew Pearce\u2014doesn't waste time adding ugly new worries to Tony's PTSD. A terrorist mastermind named \"The Mandarin\" (Ben Kingsley) has been claiming credit for setting off bombs in public places, followed by video threats of worse to come from his preposterously cheesy-looking\u2014on purpose, I mean\u2014secret lair. Kingsley is so blatantly playing a karaoke Osama bin Laden that you soon guess the filmmakers must be toying with our knee-jerk perceptions, especially since the Mandarin also talks in a hammy\u2014and obviously fake\u2014American accent. \u00C2\u00A0Anyone who thinks that's an oblique dig at how our own CIA gave the real bin Laden his start as a jihadist may not even be wrong.\n\nTony gets involved when a bomb set off outside Mann's Chinese Theater not only kills a dozen or so innocents but puts Stark Industries' security honcho, Happy Hogan (franchise regular Jon Favreau, who also\u2014maybe not insignificantly\u2014directed the first two) in the hospital in a coma. Throwing down a public challenge to the Mandarin to meet him mano a mano, our hero is so pissed off that he tells the perp on nationwide TV exactly where to find him in his ultra-swank cliffside mansion. Since he's putting Pepper at risk as well with that piece of foolhardy bravado\u2014shades of \"Bring 'em on,\" unless I miss my guess\u2014to say she isn't thrilled is an understatement.\n\n There's plenty of fun banter in the dialogue. We all know what a wiseass Tony Stark is, right? Yet the moviekeeps asking us to think about what we're being shown. Despite being packed with suggestive, often sardonic notions about the nature of terrorism and how our responses to it can be manipulated, it's keenly attuned to terror's human costs. While the filmmakers couldn't have known how much more vivid the Boston Marathon bombing would make their scenario, our all too recent memories of the real thing add considerable wrenching resonance to what's on the screen.\n\nThat's mainly because the attacks themselves aren't treated cartoonishly. While we don't see corpses\u2014everybody just gets vaporized\u2014we're acutely conscious of death and destruction. In one of the movie's eeriest images, when Tony travels to Tennessee to glean clues at the site of an earlier bombing, the victims' shadows have been preserved on a wall by the blast, surrounded by the all too familiar decor of a homemade memorial: candles, cards, and so on.\n\nWhat the audience knows before Tony figures it out is that the Mandarin has been using human bombs, biologically altered to heat their own bodies until they detonate\u2014the reason investigators can never find any sign of either a bomb or the attacker's remains. They may or may not be connected to the wunderbar new breakthrough in human engineering by Tony's rival tinkerer, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and his partner, Maya (Rebecca Hall, whose saucy wryness adds oomph to every scene she's in). \u00C2\u00A0The movie's prologue has already revealed that Tony's got a back story with both, since he blew off a then-unknown Aldrich and bedded Maya at the same Davos-like conference in Switzerland back in 1999.\n\nAll this is just the beginning of a real stew of surprise betrayals, shifting loyalties and sharp takes on the perils of dual identity, starting with (duh) Tony's own. At least until the demolition-derby finale\u2014which is not at all bad as these things go, but too iron-mandatory to be very interesting\u2014Iron Man 3 keeps its grip on you while giving action pyrotechnics surprisingly short shrift. One exception is a skyborne rescue scene that's not only spectacularly choreographed but\u2014no way around it\u2014moving.\n\nMostly, though, Tony doesn't even get to be Iron Man too often, at least not very successfully. His latest version of the big suit doesn't work very well\u2014what a great joke about sequelitis\u2014and he's often left improvising without any armor \u00C2\u00A0except his own skin. Not only does one wonderful shot feature him dragging his newly useless steel carapace across a snowy field as if it's the corpse of his other self, but Don Cheadle, returning as Colonel James Rhodes\u2014and now in charge of the government's version of the same rig, once baptized War Machine but now renamed Iron Patriot\u2014doesn't fare any better. \u00C2\u00A0Without giving too much away, Iron Patriot's role here is we never know who'll end up inside it, including the guy powerlessly trapped inside it one of the movie's more startling visual metaphors.\n\nYou may want to take that as a hint that conservatives will find lots to bridle at if they decide to get their knickers in a twist over Iron Man 3's jabs at our post-9/11 pieties. The same people who are the quickest to yell \"It's only a movie\" when reviewers complain about right-wing agendas are often the first to spray froth at a blockbuster with a detectable left-wing one, but what should they expect? Marvel always was Pinko City compared to DC's righteous vigilante crew. Yet there's plenty of other nifty stuff going on, including multiple riffs on Tony Stark's celebrity as both a prison and a boon. Not one but two of the emergency help meets he recruits are star-struck fans, one of whom has learned the right lessons from him and the other the wrong ones.\n\nIt's taken a long time for new-generation directors to teach Hollywood that superficially dumb comic-book movies can be as expressive and multilayered as any other kind. What makes Iron Man 3 an especially impressive example is that Shane Black isn't exactly the guy you'd have expected to make the most of the lesson. Though this is only his second outing as a director\u2014his debut was 2005's smirky but entertaining Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, also starring Downey\u2014he's best known as the glib dude who cooked up the Lethal Weapon franchise back in 1987, not the world's hippest credit a quarter-century later.\n\nMy hunch is that Downey had a lot to do with getting him the job. And, just conceivably, with shaping the concept, since you can easily read much of the movie as a funhouse-mirror take on the convolutions of RDJ's own cynical embrace of superstardom and second thoughts about what that cost. \u00C2\u00A0Overall, the kind of cinephile who plans to spend the rest of 2013 explicating the complexities of Upstream Color (which, mind you, deserves it) could do worse than a pit stop to\u2014gee, how to put it?\u2014marvel at everything going on here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/iron-man-3-tom-carson-review>