Film Review | Iron Man 3

Robert Downey Jr's second-wave career is one of the more inspiring stories to emerge from the tabloid purgatory of Hollywood gossip in recent years. Transforming himself into a kind of anti-Charlie Sheen after a career's worth of hell-raising - where the Oscar-nominated actor nearly ruined a winning streak with booze and alcohol - he returned to the world of the talented and sober with 2005's Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Directed by Shane Black of Lethal Weapon fame (who was undergoing his own weathered second-wave too, of sorts) it came with a Downey Jr. who was older, more grizzled and if not wiser, perhaps just that little bit sassier.

And he was lovable - stumbling through the neo-noir parody trying to play detective, he embodied the kind of endearing screw-up you just want to hug, despite the fact that he may have gate-crashed your wedding blind drunk or broke into your house to raid the liquor cabinet just a minute earlier.

So it is nicely apt that Downey and Black have now reunited for the latest instalment of the Iron Man franchise, the first entry of which not only marked Marvel Comics's bold new direction into the world of cinema - it was the inaugural film for their newly-established Marvel Studios - but the 2008 film was really the property that brought Downey Jr back into the public eye. 

But though it comes with a healthy dollop of Black-and-Downey's trademark swaggering, wry humour, their reunion is hardly a cause for celebration this time around, as Iron Man 3 finds Downey's Tony Stark in the darkest of superhero doldrums.

Scarred by the events recounted in Avengers Assemble (2012) - when he saved the world by catapulting into an alien wormhole and plummeting back to earth to his near-death - wealthy industrialist turned self-made-superhero Tony Stark is battling post-traumatic panic attacks. Much to the dismay of his secretary-turned-girlfriend-slash-business-partner Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), he copes by spending insomniac nights tinkering in his underground engineering chamber, surrounded by several iterations of his Iron Man armour.

He is awakened from his existential stupor by the arrival of a new bad guy on the scene: an (apparently) Middle Eastern terrorist who goes by the name of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) and who has taken it upon himself to teach America some "lessons" by orchestrating scattered acts of mass murder.

READ MORE: Film Review | Avengers Assemble

Pressured into reacting to the threat by the press, a frazzled Stark publically challenges the Mandarin to seek him out at his home address... which he does with aplomb, torpedoing his entire compound and threatening both Stark and Potts's lives.

As Stark goes underground - escaping to Tennessee in an attempt to pre-empt another Mandarin attack - he begins to suspect that another hidden hand may just be responsible for tearing his life apart.

It is the figure of the charming (read: slimy) scientist Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a formerly pathetic Stark admirer and Pepper Potts's rejected suitor, who has successfully developed a piece of heat-based scientific wizardry that allows people to regenerate lost body parts. But as Stark's former bodyguard Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) susses out, his henchmen appear to be deeply suspect, and Killian's operations seem to be about way more than just innocent scientific research.

Going by the initial trailers and press interviews, we were warned that, far from his bright-and-brash predecessor films, the latest Iron Man will see Stark at the end of his tether and forced to go back to basics. The worry - at least in the eyes of this humble reviewer - was that the mood would shift to accommodate the now-fashionable 'dark and gritty' route - as evidenced by hits like The Dark Knight Rises.

And while all of this ended up holding true, at least on the level of basic plot, Shane Black's film - held together by a script from co-writer Drew Pearce - doesn't plod along. It zips, bumps and bounces.

Downey Jr, doing just fine by continuing to basically play himself, embodies the rakish hero with all the requisite snark we have grown accustomed to... the only difference being that this time, his predicament is slightly more urgent than it was in previous instalments. This film finally sees a proper fleshing out of his erstwhile side-kick, James Rhodes (Don Cheadle). Previously a heavy-artillery counterpart to Iron Man, 'War Machine' is now sub-contracted to the American government and renamed 'Iron Patriot'. It's good that the two separate characters are given two distinct plot strands, so when they do come together in the film's explosive climax, it feels like Rhodes has actually been doing something for the bulk of the film, and isn't just a half-baked add-on to Tony.

Black's machismo - even if it is self-deprecating machismo - finds a perfect match in Stark, though the approach is sometimes far too slapdash. A case in point is Rebecca Hall's Maya - one of Tony's many conquests and the scientist originally responsible for Killian's 'Extremis' technology - her ambiguous role hints at entirely wasted potential.

But we'll forgive Black, and not just because all the jokes - most of which, of course, snake their way out of Downey's goateed gob - hit home. We'll forgive him because for once, he's given Iron Man a decent pair of villains. The truth behind the Mandarin is too good to even hint at, suffice it to say that Oscar-winning Sir Ben Kingsley does a sterling job of the sudden character twist.

But it is Pearce's Killian - culled from a particular 2005-6 comic book storyline, 'Iron Man: Extremis' by Warren Ellis - who delivers a generous bit of menace to the proceedings, even allowing Black to indulge a satirical itch by suggesting that the most powerful weapon one can yield these days is slick PR management.

And isn't 'Aldrich Killian' just the most delightfully Dickensian name you've ever heard?