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The film begins in a way that’s totally unlike other Marvel films. Everything from the music to the pacing to the voiceover to the overall tone is drastically different not only from the previous Iron Man films but from any of the previous Marvel movies. The idea seems to be to bring Tony’s character study, which started in Iron Man and carried through The Avengers, to a close within a single film, reminding the viewer where he came from and giving him a full arc that works within just Shane Black’s film.This is, in other words, a standalone Iron Man film, or as standalone an Iron Man film as we’re likely to get right now. It not only doesn’t require The Avengers but it doesn’t even really require the first two Iron Man films to be fulfilling (although all three of those inform the plot, so it’s not as though the film exists completely in a vacuum).The flashback that begins the film has a humor that’s over-the-top, beginning the film with a sequence that feels a little too outrageous to fit in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but is brief enough to be written off as Tony’s memory of the events. Even in the present day, though, we revisit the slapstick comic relief of the first film; Tony’s first badass moment comes after a series of brief humiliations, and is pretty short lived before entering the next one. Tonally, this movie seems to be Black’s attempt to summarize Tony’s story, in high-speed.Of course, that could be said of the second film, as well. In each Iron Man movie, we’ve started with a version of Tony who’s too bombastic and theatrical for his own good, who values the spectacle over substance to some degree. That’s something that Black plays with quite a bit in Iron Man 3, as he’s surrounded by others who, to varying degrees, do the same.War Machine is rebranded Iron Patriot just to give people a sense of ease around him. The Mandarin embraces Osama bin Laden’s guerilla video style, along with Anonymous’s cyber-tactics and the tone and tenor of an Evangelical minister when speaking. Both Killian and Hansen want things from Tony and Pepper, but they enter the story not willing to say what. These are all people who are projecting a front, for one reason or another. The illusions they cultivate serve a particular end for each character but, at the same time, become a liability to those characters throughout the film.
