Marvel: Ranking the 11 'Avengers'-era फिल्में | 6. <em>Iron Man 3</em> | EW.com 

Over a billion dollars later, it’s easy to forget the year-long skepticism that preceded the

movie with only one Avenger? Wisely, director Shane Black played his franchise debut as a relatively stripped down affair: The superhero equivalent of one of those ”Bond Goes On The Run” 007 movies, sending Tony Stark on a thrilling armor-free road trip, complete with Ty Simpkins as a scenestealing kid sidekick who also feels like a self-aware parody of a kid sidekick.

Self-awareness permeates the film — one year later, Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin looks more and more like a pointed response to the overarching seriousness of the

franchise. And the fun-times vibe masks the film’s central flaw. Because truth time: Extremis is a pretty boring thing to build a movie around, the least interesting derivation of Marvel’s tendency to construct plots around All-Powerful Color-Tinted Energy Macguffins. (See also: the Tesseract, the Aether.)

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