A Very (Shane) Black Christmas: and an IRON MAN 3 New Year!

People don’t really like feeling like a movie is messing with them.

The last five years has blessed (cursed) all of us with near-constant STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI arguments, even for people don’t give two shits about the now-sort-of-floundering space franchise. There are lots and lots of reasons why that particular blockbuster was so divisive that it still feels like people can’t shut the fuck up about it, but one of the most telling insights into why it rubbed people the wrong way actually came from a Film Crit Hulk treatise on the movie’s many unheralded virtues:

I was having a conversation with one of my local bartenders I love. We’ve had a lot of lovely, spirited bar arguments. Sports. Movies. You name it. And it’s always been fun and inclusive. But The Last Jedi is the first time I have ever seen him incensed. He kept yelling at us and talking about all the things that were so “stupid” about the film, and then proclaiming that the director “clearly doesn’t understand the tone of Star Wars!” He made this point particularly about the sense of humor in the opening Poe scene. It didn’t matter that I pointed out the tone was no different from Han’s off-the-cuff joke, “everything’s fine here… how are you?” as well as a litany of other moments. He finally just yelled, “I felt like the film was making fun of me!”

This sentiment of “that movie was making fun of me!” was expressed by others at the time. Cheo Hodari Coker, the show runner behind the Netflix LUKE CAGE series, went off at length in a Twitter thread (that I naturally can no longer find) about how the moment where THE LAST JEDI resolves THE FORCE AWAKENS' “cliffhanger” by having Luke toss his lightsaber off said cliff made him feel mocked for caring about that moment in the first place.

Now, I would argue that there’s no other way for that moment to resolve (imagine if THE LAST JEDI opened with Luke grabbing his lightsaber, telling Rey “let’s go”, and then wreaking havoc on the First Order, with the whole thing wrapping up in ten minutes; what a great movie!!!!), but Coker isn’t a stupid man, nor is he coming from a place of bad faith. He’s a smart and insightful creative and Star Wars fan who wanted to like Episode 8. And he didn’t. It’s worth paying attention to.

He didn’t like the feeling of being messed with. Nor did Film Crit Hulk’s bartender friend. Nor did many of the smart people I know who also didn’t like THE LAST JEDI very much. It’s what it is.

Of course, blockbuster sequels being spear-headed by filmmakers with a unique sensibility that immediately piss off half the audience by screwing with the format is nothing new. In the wake of the unprecedented blockbuster success of THE AVENGERS, it was time for Marvel Studios to begin its next phase of solo films to build up to the next team-up. First on deck: a third IRON MAN solo movie. After an extremely well-liked first installment in 2008, and a major step down in quality in 2010 with IRON MAN 2, Marvel needed to take a big swing to energize the franchise that started it all. And star/executive producer/mega-string-puller Robert Downey Jr. knew just the guy.

Enter Shane Black.

IRON MAN 3

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Ben Kingsley

Directed by: Shane Black

Written by: Black, Drew Pearce

Released: May 3, 2013

Length: 131 minutes

A year after the events of The Battle of New York, Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is in a bad place. It turns out he never really recovered from his trip into space at the end of THE AVENGERS, nor from his confirmation that aliens exist and they want to kill us. He’s easily triggered into panic attacks, he’s mindlessly building iron suits in his basement and, most of all, he’s freaking Pepper Potts (Paltrow) out.

He’s picked a bad time to have PTSD, though, because there’s a new global threat out there, and his name is The Mandarin (Kingsley). He has the ability to hijack all U.S. television stations at any time to broadcast his taunting, disturbing messages; he also appears to have the ability to wreak havoc at will, setting off bombs and striking terror into the hearts of every American.

On top of everything else, a ghost from Stark’s playboy past appears to be returning to haunt him. Back in 1999, during a New Year’s Eve party in Switzerland, Stark blows off Aldrich Killian (Pearce), the awkward and disabled creator of the fledgling Advanced Idea Mechanics company, in order to make time with geneticist Maya Hansen (Hall), whose work on a project named Extremis may have unlocked the key to tissue regeneration. Now in 2013, Killian, who looks healthy, youthful and revitalized, returns to Stark Industries with an offer. AIM has taken off and he’s now trying head-hunt Pepper Potts to come work for him. Meanwhile, Hansen returns to Stark to inform him she works for AIM now, which means Killian has his hands on Extremis.

Jon Favreau (who also continues to play Happy Hogan both in this and in the MCU at large) was the original architect of the IRON MAN franchise, having directed the first two installment. However, Favreau tapped out of helming a third film by December 2010, opting instead to direct the never-completed MAGIC KINGDOM movie (no tears for Favreau, he’s clearly landed on his feet). Although he remained an executive producer on THE AVENGERS, IRON MAN 3 was going to need a new captain at the head of the ship.

Not long after Favreau’s departure, Downey Jr. hopped on the phone to contact the man who helped revitalize his career nearly ten years before. By February 2011, Shane Black was in final negotiations to direct and write the third IRON MAN movie. By March, Black was the director and co-writer on the script with Drew Pearce, who would go on to co-write FAST AND FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBES & SHAW and would do the story for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION. A roller coaster of a career, indeed.

IRON MAN 3 found itself in an interesting slot in the MCU at that time. It not only had to follow up the ensemble success of THE AVENGERS, it also had to recover from the disappointment that was IRON MAN 2, a film that both collapsed under its own world-building weight (the movie just stops halfway through to re-introduce Nick Fury and Agent Coulson) and cast doubt that Marvel Studios was going to be able to handle its own ambitions.

But the Tony Stark threequel is largely a success! It’s a movie with things on its mind, even if it does have to remember its ultimate four-quadrant obligations at the end of the day. The whole thing with Rhodey’s War Machine (Cheadle) being re-skinned into a red-white-and-blue Iron Patriot in order to do overseas merc work for the U.S. government is an outrageously potent metaphor coming from a cinematic universe that would have to play ball with the Air Force a little over five years later.

It’s also maybe one of the only features in the MCU that portrays a character actually dealing with all the shit he’s seen? There are little nods here and there throughout the franchise to residual trauma; the feeling of loss hangs over ENDGAME, Thor gets a moment in INFINITY WAR to process everything that’s he’s faced, there’s WANDAVISION on the TV side of things. But here, Tony Stark’s ultimate arc is “getting over PTSD”, and it takes him until the end of the movie to really achieve that. It’s to IRON MAN 3’s credit that it takes Stark’s emotional fragility at face value. One of the worst things about modern franchise filmmaking is that the stories so often boil down to being power fantasies, the desire to see our heroes kick ass and be reassured about how cool it is that they’re kicking ass and how cool YOU are for watching them kick ass. Here, Tony Stark gets talked down from a panic attack by a kid he’s just met. It’s profoundly uncool. It’s great.

Shane Black and Drew Pearce also understands that Tony Stark is infinitely more interesting than Iron Man. It’s no mistake that the strongest stretch of the film by far is its middle section where Stark is alone and stranded in the middle of snowy Tennessee with said strange kid, completely stripped of his suit. He’s back to having to use his substantial wits and smarts to get himself back to the West Coast and save the day. It’s something that kind of got lost previously in IRON MAN 2, which felt like all suits, all the time. Seeing Stark become more of a detective is a blast, and it feels like a running back of the dynamic Downey Jr. got to play in KISS KISS BANG BANG.

Also, the Christmas aspect you’ve come to expect from a Shane Black movie is in full force, and ramps up a notch once the movie moves from Malibu to snowy Tennessee. Actually, IRON MAN 3 is one of the rare blockbusters that makes New Year’s Eve a crucial plot point; as mentioned above, the turning of the clock from 1999 to 2000 is sort of the beginning of the end for Stark here. We also get a fun Christmas track near the start of the movie, a remix of “Jingle Bells” by Joe Williams. It can't hold a candle to THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT’s X-Mas factor but it ranks high, especially since Marvel hadn’t really taken much advantage of seasonal moods up until really recently.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that IRON MAN 3 is an oasis of musical identity in a franchise that has famously been accused of lacking it. Specifically, it features absolutely the grooviest end-credits music in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, a fitting Brian Tyler track that sums up the mood and swerve of the movie as much as anything else. Why, yes, I can dig it!

Of course, IRON MAN 3 isn’t perfect. At 130 minutes, it’s a long movie that feels longer; whether that’s a result of Black being given a higher budget and ramping up the spectacle and CGI in response, or just a symptom of the bloated franchise threequel is debatable (it’s likely a mix of both). There’s also some weird moments that only make sense if you keep up with Marvel’s corporate machinations; you’d be forgiven for not knowing that the only reason the movie introduces us to Wang Xuequi’s Dr. Wu in the first scene, only to never see him again until the closing seconds, is to serve an alternate Chinese cut of the film where Dr. Wu pimps out milk drinks and local industrial companies.

Then there’s the most famous thing about the movie, the moment that endures in conversation after a decade, a moment that to some degree the MCU is still trying to deal with.

That would be the Mandarin twist.

Specifically, it’s the revelation that the big, scary, bin Laden-esque Mandarin character is, in reality, a drunk, loser actor named Trevor Slattery, nothing more than a puppet for the REAL bad guys operating in the shadows. It’s notable the wild swing Kingsley takes in his performance here, going from cool and calculated in the beginning, to a broad, burping, nearly cross-eyed cartoon character by the end.

Needless to say, many people were pissed. To get an idea of the general sentiment, check out the Honest Trailer for IRON MAN 3 sometime. It wasn’t a universal opinion, but it seemed to me that even people who liked the movie seemed to hate that moment (my 2013 memories are a little fuzzy, but as I recall, the group I saw it with was split right down the middle on it).

The reason I hear most often to explain the distaste for this decision is that it wiped out a major villain from the comics and replaced him with both a cartoonish asshole and a bland, unsatisfying corporate baddie. However, I have to wonder if it just goes back to the idea of not wanting to feel messed with. Here I am, really enjoying this modern update to a somewhat problematic comic arch-nemesis, and then the rug gets pulled from under me. How is that fair?

With about ten years of reflection, I can concede that the Mandarin twist falls short of something like THE LAST JEDI’s anti-twist regarding Rey’s parentage, a move that built carefully towards the film’s greater point about the Force being accessible to everybody, even a wayward orphan girl on the outskirts of the universe. Here, The Mandarin being a drug-addicted dork actor named Trevor is admittedly just a rug-pull for the sake of a rug-pull. “You thought he was this, but he’s actually this! Got you!” It also puts the film, and the MCU at large, in a hole it can’t quite get out of. As a result of this twist, there’s no longer a real compelling villain at the middle of it all (Killian ultimately doesn’t really fill the gap). It also took a major Marvel villain off the board, and the studio bought the twist back almost immediately with the ALL HAIL THE KING short before casting Tony Leung as the real Mandarin in SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS.

But, at the same time, the fact that Marvel allowed Black to do the rug-pull anyway showed a willingness of the studio to hand over the keys to a filmmaker to let him do his thing he was theoretically hired for. And that might be the most miraculous thing about IRON MAN 3: it’s most definitely a Shane Black film. It’s set during Christmas, it pairs our lead with an unlikely partner (at least for part of the film, and it’s naturally the best stretch), and it plays on your expectations of an action film with many moments of subversion built and baked into the script; it’s no surprise that the biggest laugh of the movie comes from a henchman suddenly pleading for his release, stating “I hate working here, they’re so weird”.

Another kinda beautiful thing about Black’s creation here: there’s not a whole lot of world-building for future MCU installments. It seems utterly impossible for a mega-franchise that can often feel like homework nowadays, but outside of maaaaybe a little tease towards Pepper becoming Rescue like five years later (bet you forgot that happened in ENDGAME) and Slattery’s big return in SHANG-CHI, there aren’t a whole lot of threads here that contribute to The Big Marvel Story. It’s a stand-alone swan song for Tony Stark as a solo lead.

If anything, IRON MAN 3 concludes by closing a door future movies would have to reopen. It ends with Tony Stark finally getting the shrapnel in his heart removed, and his arc reactor thrown into the ocean. Despite the final line of the movie being “I am Iron Man”, the heavy implication is that Stark is retiring the persona, his soul being finally freed of the ghosts of his past and the burdens of his present.

Of course, it will come as no surprise to see Iron Man zip-zap-zopping away in the air the next time we see him, in the opening minutes of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. The Big Marvel Story At Work! I tease, but it does take some of the punch out of a movie’s bold storytelling choice when the next guy has to undo or completely ignore them (another parallel to be drawn here to STAR WARS’ final two chapters).

Still, IRON MAN 3 takes its place next to CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, THE AVENGERS, THOR: RAGNAROK, BLACK PANTHER and the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films as the list of Marvel Cinematic Universe films that feel completely and truly informed by the man behind the camera (note: this doesn’t mean these are the only good ones, nor is it necessarily slander against the ones not listed, please no fights going into the new year).

It was also enough of a success to bring Black back to his rightful place as the oddball writer of Hollywood. 2016’s THE NICE GUYS and 2018’s THE PREDATOR would follow; one was quite beloved, the other…wasn’t, but completely missing sometimes is the consequence of taking big swings.

The MCU has changed a lot since 2013, some for good (the makeup of their on and offscreen talent has finally diversified; they admittedly nailed the landing with ENDGAME) and some for bad (the fact that Scorsese has to take a meeting with Iger like some sort of mafioso every time he lodges a valid complaint about the MCU; the CGI is starting to look really rushed, a consequence of their actively hostile business practices). As the portfolio of lead heroes kept expanding (and Downey Jr.s’ price tag kept rising), we never did get another movie with Tony Stark as the lead. You sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had gotten an IRON MAN 4 with a returning Shane Black at the helm.

Then again, you take a look at something like THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER and you start to recognize that sometimes lightning in a bottle is just that.

Maybe messing with everybody once was enough.