Iron Man 3

Film (2013)

With Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Don Cheadle (Colonel James Rhodes), Guy Pearce (Aldrich Killian), Rebecca Hall (Maya Hansen), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Ben Kingsley (The Mandarin), Ty Simpkins (Harley Keener)

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is the Ironman and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is his gracefully appointed and adept colleague and girlfriend. He faces routing by an evil wizard in the Osama bin Laden mode, played by Ben Kingsley, and a very overheated executive manager played by Guy Pearce, which he must overcome with a lot of snapping on of iron body armor that flies through the air and attaches to him automatically.

In the 1960s, James Bond, especially with Sean Connery’s glibly elegant handling of the role, provided the perfect melding of glamour, sexiness and the ironic stance, yielding a suspense that was also charming and funny and did not take itself too seriously.

One of the great charms of those early Bond films involved the banter about technology. Through Q, the master of the new gadgets that Bond would have at his disposal, one got a continually renewed sense of the fun that was in store through his glib revelations delivered in dry and direct British style.

Technology in Iron Man 3 has evolved to such an extent that the Bond gadgets seem like ancient artifacts. Since Tony Stark is the technology hobbyist par excellence, there is no Q to reveal the latest and greatest. However, one of the cutenesses of Iron Man 3 is that the voice of the Iron Man intelligence, the inhabiting robot technologist, is a British voice much in the tradition of Star Wars’ 3CP0, the very gold and lanky robot with the Edwardian British accent. It is not exactly Q, but provides a dryly charming alternative.

In Iron Man 3, Robert Downey Jr. is able to bring much of the same witty energy to the role as Sean Connery did in those early Bond films, while somehow remaining convincing as an effective action character in the comic book mode. With Ty Simpkins, who plays a young boy, Harley Keener, who has fallen into the position of having to help Tony out, Downey is extremely funny; he carries off dialogue with this kid with just the right slightly callously realistic, but ironic, tone to make it hysterical and heartfelt at once.

There is more than enough of the bad boy in Robert Downey Jr.’s persona to prevent his roles from ever becoming too sacrosanct. As action hero, he becomes self-effacing and vulnerable rather than indelibly deified, the pleasant wink always on the cusp of his eyelid giving the clue that he has not lost his humanity.

This film, perhaps surprisingly, has the virtues of two wonderful leading women to its advantage. Rebecca Hall, a British actress, here plays an American scientist, Maya Hansen, with a flawless accent. Gwyneth Paltrow, as Pepper Potts, brings graceful elegance to the hybrid role of corporation executive and hero’s girlfriend.

As though this were not enough in the star department, Ben Kingsley shows up as The Mandarin, the seemingly deranged American variant of Osama bin Laden, and carries off the varieties of his persona convincingly. Guy Pearce is a compelling challenger, his protruding choppers posing, with the openings of all ripostes, a bulging threat of mastication. Without giving too much away, however, we may note that, in the end, his specialty is closer to cooking than chewing.

The action keeps coming and the action music never stops, but somehow the wryly interposed personal moments carried off by this masthead of great actors makes for an entertainment that derives as much from its words and gestures as from its flashing lights and magically reassembled chunks of armor.

– BADMan