Iron Man has defeated the three movie curse! With a blast of repulsor ray and that signature charm, Robert Downey Jr. and company easily live up to expectations, and deliver on the promise that there are still movies to be made after last year’s The Avengers. Iron Man 3 is a fantastic action film, one built on the shoulders of Downey’s command performance as Tony Stark. Is there any cooler or more popular character in Hollywood right now than Tony Stark?

Iron Man 3: 4/5: Good!

While Iron Man 3 doesn’t match the spectacle of The Avengers, it doesn’t have to. Instead, Iron Man 3 shows us the blueprint for all of these upcoming superhero solo films. It focuses on Tony, the man beneath the armor, and it does an exceptional job. The Avengers went big, so Iron Man 3 gets personal. This is Tony’s movie, and Downey carries it with ease. The rest of the cast do their best to keep up, but Pepper and Rhodey can’t match the excitement and energy of Captain America, Thor and the Hulk. Still, they try, and mostly succeed. Gwyneth Paltrow, especially, steps up in a big way as Pepper Potts. This may be her best of the three films. As for the new characters, they mostly hold their own, but none of them – including the villains – are anything to write home about.

Though the Mandarin is pretty awesome, and not at all what any of us probably expected.

I’m very happy with Iron Man 3. It’s not a perfect film, but whatever complaints I might have are very minor. The first third felt a little mediocre, I suppose. The humor and one-liners weren’t as funny as other Marvel films. The emotional connection wasn’t very strong. And the villains didn’t have a lot of depth. But seriously, these are very minor, almost meaningless gripes.

The Iron Man franchise is as strong as it’s ever been, as is the Marvel Movieverse. Iron Man 3 could serve as the series finale, and I would be perfectly happy with that. But I bet we’ll see an Iron Man 4, and hopefully Robert Downey Jr. will  be a part of it.

Join me after the jump for my full review! There will be some SPOILERS, so be warned. Plenty of reviews on the web are spoiler-free, but I’d like to be able to talk about some of the cooler moments in the movie. So please, if you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading now. It’ll be worth it, trust me.

If you take nothing away from this review, know that I loved Iron Man 3. It was as good as I could have hoped it would be, perhaps even a little better. My faith in Marvel Studios has been rewarded again and again. Usually having a studio mess with a movie is a sign of bad news. Look what happened to Spider-Man 3 when the studio started making demands. But the people at Marvel Studios (and Disney, I guess) seem to know exactly what they’re doing. Plus they seem willing to step back and let their directors make a movie. Iron Man 3 is directed by Shane Black, and I enjoyed his earlier film, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. But that’s not enough for me to be able to recognize any sort of Shane Black style that may have gone into Iron Man 3. Suffice to say, the man did a great job.

No autographs, please

Iron Man 3 picks up some time after The Avengers, and the life of a world-saving celebrity superhero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After fighting off an alien invasion, and nearly sacrificing himself to travel through a wormhole into another dimension, Tony Stark is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety attacks. The poor guy can’t sleep. I think this was a great direction to take Tony. Rather than just rely on the smarm and the charm of previous movies, we get to see our hero in a new light. Not that Tony isn’t his usual charming, snarky self. That’s what puts butts in seats.

During this period of internal crisis, several new villains emerge to challenge our hero. First up is the Mandarin, an enigmatic terrorist leader who has been bombing several targets around the globe in order to ‘teach America a lesson’, as he puts it. Imagine if Osama bin Laden were a super-villain, and it’s a great way to use the Mandarin in this post-9/11 world. His original incarnation from the comics as a yellow-skinned Chinese stereotype definitely wouldn’t fly. The other villain is Aldrich Killian, a suave, handsome businessman who is working on a project to unlock the potential of the human body/brain, and turn people (and himself) into molten super soldiers. That the Mandarin and Killian team up is a given in a movie like this, but I won’t spoil exactly how.

I’ll save that for you to discover. I saw the twist coming before it was revealed, but it was still a lot of fun. And Ben Kingsley is fantastic as the Mandarin.

Yay! They pulled him off without offending anyone!

Guy Pearce as Killian isn’t as good though, I’m afraid. He’s menacing, he’s dangerous, and all of that good stuff, but he’s not a very memorable villain. You know he’s the bad guy from the first moment you see him on screen, and while his plan is diabolical, it’s pretty standard. I wish more of an emphasis had been placed on the fact that Tony builds weapons for people to use, whereas Killian turns people into weapons. It’s a distinction I feel the movie should have made considering the first two Iron Man films both had villains wearing their own suits of armor.

This movie, unlike most superhero movies, isn’t about the villain. Unlike, say, Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent, Tony Stark is infinitely entertaining. It doesn’t matter who he fights, as long as Tony stays awesome and gets some good action scenes.

He gets those in spades, but he also gets a lot of great character-building scenes. Tony spends the middle chunk of the movie without his suit and without his usual resources, and it’s up to just the man to try and figure out the Mandarin’s plan. These are some great scenes, with Tony putzing around middle of nowhere Tennessee with a kid sidekick. That was a little weird. Why the adorable ruggamuffin? On the one hand, who puts a kid sidekick in movies anymore? But on the other hand, some of the best dialogue came from Tony messing around with that kid. So the scenes definitely worked, especially to build up Tony from broken man back into an action hero.

Go ahead, take a minute

I just wish the villains were a little deeper. Killian has an army of loyal goons following him, but I wish we got a little more depth into what drove them to side with Killian. His experiment caused them to regrow lost limbs, but is that really enough to turn them from loyal American soldiers into terrorists willing to kill the President? I guess so. But I suppose one shouldn’t expect too much depth in movie henchmen.

A surprising standout in this film was the Iron Man armor itself. For the first time, it felt like the armor was its own character, all thanks to the Mark 42 (I think we can all guess how that number was chosen).

There’s a lot of sitting in this movie

I still think all of the gold makes the armor look kind of hideous, but the movie had a lot of fun playing with MK 42 and all of the ways that it can both automatically fly onto Tony’s body or simply be piloted remotely. Though was anyone else let down after the big airplane rescue scene when it was revealed that Tony wasn’t really in the armor?

Speaking of armors being operated remotely, the ending is fantastic. Just like you see in the trailers, Tony calls in all of the extra armors he’s been building, and they’re this automated army of Iron Man drones zipping and flying around taking out the bad guys. And he switches from one armor to the next in his big fight against Killian. I kind of wish the movie used Jarvis to explain which armor Tony was putting on at any given time, and how it differed from the others, but it was still a ton of fun, and a very cool way to take Iron Man to the next level.

Aquatic Iron Man, Arctic Iron Man, Stealth Iron Man, Waffle Iron Man

Speaking of next levels, how cool was Pepper Potts’ Big Damn Hero moment? I won’t say anything more, but that was just plain awesome.

The ending of Iron Man 3 was picture perfect, especially if this is the last film in the Iron Man series. It probably won’t be, but the ending works just fine. Tony blows up all of his extra armors to make Pepper happy, and he finally has the shrapnel in his chest surgically removed. It’s a nice wrap-up for Tony as a character, especially with his line about his armor being a cocoon, and now he’s ready to emerge as a new man. Very fitting ending.

My only gripe is that, much like the Thor movie, why the heck do all of these Marvel movies end in a way that’s problematic for the larger Avengers series? Thor destroying the Bifrost Bridge, cutting him off from planet Earth – so in The Avengers, they had to come up with some line about ‘dark matter’ or whatever to bring him back to Earth. We all know that Iron Man will be in Avengers 2, and probably Iron Man 4, so why end this film with Tony blowing up his armors?

It may work perfectly as a wrap-up to this trilogy, and as an ending to this movie, but it just seems silly when you look at the big picture.

That’s OK though, I can deal with silly. Especially when it’s this awesome.