Iron Man 3

The saddest thing about this movie is that I really thought it was going to be summer’s best action flick.

Like many third sequels, though, there was a new director and a new opportunity to flop. Putting almost no effort into the screenplay and ridding themselves of it like an issue of a comic book, they could write the most gimmicky action movie ever conceived and still rake in a cool $170 million.

And they did.

“Iron Man 3” is the worst action film I’ve seen since the infamous “Spider-Man 3.” And for those of you who saw that, you know that’s a big statement. This film was poorly crafted, inattentively directed and ill-paced.

I’m going to reveal a few “spoilers” in this review, mainly because I don’t think there’s much in this movie that was so good it could be “spoiled.” The plot was predictable and pulled so many clichés that I lost count.

Tony Stark (Downey) takes up the iron suit again. This time, he’s up against an unbelievably xenophobic representation of a terrorist. The adversary’s henchmen are semi-immortals with a vague, lava-like biology that rebuilds itself all Wolverine-like. Their biology is the result of some high-tech botany? But they also turn other things into lava? Their limbs can be cut off, but they’re immune to bullets? They breathe fire, too? Explosions ensue.

The summer “epic” spent about 70 percent of its time on some of the worst plot writing I’d ever seen, 20 percent on the great summer action flick we’d all anticipated and a sour 10 percent sweeping in at the end to say, unsubtly, “This movie was about romance all along.”

The feared “Mandarin” is one part Native American vengeance story and one part Chinese, and of course he’s located in Pakistan.

Applause all around, writers, you’ve decided to create an original comic book villain so indistinct that it stigmatizes three different cultures instead of the usual one.

“Iron Man” was a series of missed opportunities. Starting with the introduction to Stark’s emotional side, they decide to run with a PTSD subplot using anxiety attacks induced by memories of the “Avengers” plot, which the whole movie could have done without.

The film also dabbled in the classic “evil suit” plotline, where the hero must give up the vanity of his heroism in order to truly know his capability. To that end, most of the movie was spent out of the suit, and again, the audience was disappointed.

Pepper Potts (Paltrow) wore the suit, though, which I had heard about and was excited to see, but the moment lasted all of 25 seconds, and she shot nothing. I don’t think she even flew.

The rest of the film was a lot of snotty humor, dismissing an audience for the sake of making fun of itself.

Fellow reviewer, Patrick Beane, whom I saw the movie with, made the acute observation that Shane Black tried to accomplish the quirky and aware humor style of Joss Whedon, dismissing self-seriousness with finesse. Instead, everything felt like a deadpan standup comedy act, the audience in awe at how confidently these bad punchlines were delivered.

A few final highlights: The script was so expository, so hand-holding, that this (paraphrased) sentence actually made its way into the final cut: “We have to save either Pepper or the President! We can’t save both!”

The film hardly delivers on the action front. Otherwise, I would have given a higher rating and just dealt with camp. But it didn’t. The final showdown was anticlimactic. The movie swallows itself whole with no consequence and the story is tied with a neat, little bow.

By Francisco Tirado