In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we return to the Marvel machine with Iron Man 3.
For me, Iron Man 3 occupies the same space among the Iron Man movies that Last Crusade occupies in the Indiana Jones series: It’s not the best one, but it is my favorite. While the original will always be the perfectly crafted game-changer, Iron Man 3 has enough weird little idiosyncrasies and fun character beats to keep me coming back. Chalk that up to Jon Favreau handing the reins off to Shane Black1, who takes the superhero trappings and molds it into the form of a Tom Clancy-esque spy thriller. With jokes. Lots of jokes.
It’s important to remember that at this point in the whole grand Marvel Studios experiment, the studio was just starting to ride high on its own farts. The Avengers came out the year before and managed to conquer the entire planet, becoming the third highest grossing movie of all time2. A third Iron Man movie was a certainty even before The Avengers, and the ace up the film’s sleeve is that it plays more like a sequel to its own string of films than as a direct continuation of the big team-up. A couple of important threads carry over from Avengers to Iron Man 3, but Shane Black and co-writer Drew Pearce were very smart in crafting a movie that could stand on its own, apart from the MCU at large. Which, ultimately, is the reason why every MCU film that came after this acts like Iron Man 3 never even happened.
As the film opens we’re introduced to Tony Stark (RDJ) & Co. ringing in the year 2000 at a swanky European hotel to the tune of Eiffel 65’s “Blue”. (Helluva way to start a movie, no joke.) Tony is approached by pimply nerdlinger Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce, no relation to Drew) to fund his new tech venture, which Tony instantly blows off in order to hit on fellow scientist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) instead. You best believe both of these characters will return with some kind of a vengeance.
Thirteen years later, Tony finds himself experiencing heavy PTSD after the events of The Avengers, and deals with it by tinkering with his suits; building autonomous suits that fly around on their own, suits he can control with his mind, and a suit that he can summon to himself piecemeal thanks to a series of magnetic implants that cannot possibly be a healthy life choice. In the meantime, America is terrorized by a non-region-specific-but-vaguely-Middle-Eastern terrorist calling himself The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), who’s been setting off random bombs around the country. One such bomb nearly kills Tony’s bodyguard Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), causing Tony to personally call out the Mandarin, giving out his home address on live TV, which goes exactly as well as you would think.
This is apparently one of Shane Black’s favorite plot devices. The villain showing up at the hero’s front door looking for trouble. In Lethal Weapon, Riggs fistfights Gary Busey on Murtaugh’s front lawn. In The Monster Squad, Dracula shows up at the main kid’s house looking for his magic amulet. And in The Nice Guys, Ryan Gosling’s house gets machine-gunned to pieces by a would-be assassin. It’s an easy trick for establishing how dangerous the villain is, and that nowhere is truly safe. This is taken to its logical extreme in Iron Man 3, when Tony’s cliffside Malibu estate gets blown to smithereens at the end of the first act.
[EDITOR’S NOTE] Here’s a fun fact: I wrote the above paragraph before reading the (very short) chapter on Iron Man 3 in the book “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios”. It’s just something I’ve noticed that happens in a lot of Shane Black movies. But in the MCU book, they explain that when Black first met with Marvel HQ about doing Iron Man 3, the one thing they told him they wanted was for Tony Stark’s house to go kerblooey. I’d like to think they already knew what Black was gonna do before he did it, so they went ahead and worked it into the budget.
The A-plot follows Tony as he escapes this disaster to investigate the Mandarin’s string of terrorist bombings, forced to manually lug around the piecemeal prototype suit that only barely works in the first place. It’s actually kinda nice to see Tony Stark struggle and have to work for something for a change. This is also, as it turns out, the last time I would ever find myself rooting for Tony Stark. All of his later appearances are marred by Robert Downey, Jr. delivering flaky, distracted performances that make it all but obvious he’s counting the minutes until he can go back to the dump truck full of money Kevin Feige backed up in his front yard. Downey’s performance here finds Tony Stark back at the bottom again and having to work his way back up, dealing with PTSD and forcing himself to actually put himself in harm’s way instead of building suits to do the dirty work for him3.
So anyway, what’s actually going on here? Turns out Aldrich Killian got swole and handsome, and has enlisted Maya Hansen and her Extremis project to take veterans wounded in combat and turn them into human time bombs. Killian, as it turns out, is working with The Mandarin. Then later, it turns out he actually is The Mandarin, and Ben Kingsley is simply an actor hired to portray the character and do Killian’s dirty work4. Meanwhile, Killian manages to kidnap the president (William Sadler) by hijacking the War Machine suit worn by James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who now goes by the moniker Iron Patriot. Also Killian kidnaps Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), because she’s still hanging around and the movie doesn’t really have anything for her to do but be the damsel in distress, unfortunately. This whole paragraph is really just an excuse to remind you that half these people are still in the movie, they just don’t get to do a whole lot.
All of these moving parts don’t seem like they’re going to fit together until suddenly they do. Also, because this is a Shane Black movie, all of this is happening at Christmas. It’s the holiday season, which Black claims is a perfect vehicle for conflict, an experience that is universal, something everyone can identify with. In the same interview with SlashFilm, Black pretty bluntly states that “there’s something just pleasing about it to me.” In other words—and this is something I’ve suspected for a long time—Shane Black sets all of his movies at Christmas simply because he likes the pretty lights. Can’t blame the guy for that. I have a whole podcast about it for the same reason.
There’s not much more to tell with Iron Man 3. The film effectively brings Tony Stark’s entire character arc to an end in a way that feels earned. He’s learned to stand on his own without using his suits as a crutch; he finally allows a doctor to remove the shrapnel from his chest5, effectively rendering the doohickey in his chest meaningless; he and Pepper are officially An Item. Tony Stark has taken some legitimate steps to grow as a human being, which makes his next appearance in Age of Ultron so disheartening, because by then he’s done a complete backslide on all of this.
But those are complaints for another day. What matters is that Iron Man 3 is a perfectly fun, dynamic entry in the MCU at a point when the entire franchise was starting to calcify into the well-oiled machine that we know today. Writer/director-driven entries would become few and far between in the MCU moving forward, which makes this feel even more special. It’s a good one. Merry Christmas.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Despite stepping away from directing and producing these films, Favreau’s decision to cast himself as Happy Hogan means he still gets to pop up for a few fun scenes and cash a paycheck. Happy becomes more of a comic relief character than he was in Iron Man or the sequel, but you can tell Favreau’s enjoying doing this and not dealing with any of the behind-the-scenes crap. It makes the scene where Happy nearly gets blown up all the more harrowing. Happy becomes a calming presence in future entries, and we’ll be seeing plenty more of him soon.
FINAL RATING
3.5 stars (out of five). S’pretty good.
NEXT TIME: Scorsese comes calling.
- Robert Downey, Jr. personally recommended Black after Black basically saved Downey’s career with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
↩︎ - At the time. It was third, right behind James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic. Since then, Avengers has slipped to #12 on the all-time list.
↩︎ - This, incidentally, is literally the plot of Age of Ultron which, once again, completely negates Iron Man 3 from the conversation. It’s like Joss Whedon saw what Shane Black did here and said, “Nuh uh, I’m doing that.”
↩︎ - This also gets walked back later in a Marvel One Shot titled “All Hail The King”, where Kingsley finds himself sprung outta jail so he can meet the real Mandarin, a plot thread that would not payoff for another seven years.
↩︎ - This character, Dr. Wu, only appears briefly in the original cut, but the cut of the film shown in China features the character performing the surgery for five whole minutes, with dialogue and everything. At the time, Hollywood did just about everything they could to court Chinese audiences. ↩︎
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