Marvel’s “Iron Man 3” pits brash-but-brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man against an enemy whose reach knows no bounds. When Stark finds his personal world destroyed at his enemy’s hands, he embarks on a harrowing quest to find those responsible. This journey, at every turn, will test his mettle. With his back against the wall, Stark is left to survive by his own devices, relying on his ingenuity and instincts to protect those closest to him. As he fights his way back, Stark discovers the answer to the question that has secretly haunted him: does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man?
After the box office and critical success of ‘The Avengers’, ‘Iron Man 3’ is the first entry of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe Phase Two. Or, the first stand alone adventure that will keep audiences happy until ‘The Avengers: Age of Ultron’.
Picking up after “the events in New York City”, we find ex-military industrialist turned self-made superhero, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) a shell of his former self. Sure, he’s still acerbic and brilliant and snarky, but Tony’s suffering from superhero PTSD. He can’t sleep, thanks to recurring nightmares of falling through an inter-dimensional wormhole, and any brief mention of New York is enough to give him an extreme anxiety attack.
Tony, being who he is, knows he needs help, but instead spends time tinkering, creating and building an entire fleet of new Iron Man suits.
While Tony is close to cracking, two events threaten to send him all the way over the edge. First, an international terrorist who calls himself The Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsly) is bombing US targets around the world. There have been nine attacks thus far, and the weird part is investigators have been unable to find any trace of the bombs, or The Mandarin. Second, a man named Aldrige Killian (Guy Pearce) returns from Tony’s past to pitch Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) — who is not only Tony’s girlfriend, but the President of Stark Industries — on a new technology that will allow them to hack and unlock the full potential of the mind. Tony’s long time bodyguard, Happy (Jon Favreau), thinks Killian has romantic eyes for Pepper.