My editor tells me I should give a spoiler alert here, but if I spoiled Iron Man 3 for you enough to stop you from going, I'd be doing you a favor. It's a bad movie, but that's fine, and hardly unusual for a summer blockbuster. What is unusual, and criminal, is what is done to the actor Ben Kingsley and his character the Mandarin. I'm going to give away the plot, so stop reading if you want to waste your money and see it for yourself.
One of the reasons I'm so irritated about Iron Man 3's awfulness is that it so obviously could have been great. I just finished The Friedkin Connection, a memoir by the great director William Friedkin. Friedkin directed The French Connection and The Exorcist, among other films. The Friedkin Connection is an easy, conversational memoir, which is fine, because with over five decades in Hollywood, Friedkin, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, has some incredible stories to tell. He doesn't need melodrama.
One of the most interesting chapters in The Friedkin Connection is the filming of The Exorcist in the early 1970s (yes, this ultimately has to do with Iron Man 3). To get the right voice of the demon who was possessing the young girl Regan, Friedkin hired Mercedes McCambridge, an award-winning actress who had been a star of stage, screen, and, most importably for Freidkin, 1940s radio dramas.
When she was hired, McCambridge told Freidkin that she was a devout Catholic who was in AA, but that she was willing to drink smoke, and go to extremes to get the voice right. She was in consultation with priests while recording the demon's voice, and at times had herself tied to a chair to capture the feeling of Regan being trapped.
The result, of course, is one of the greatest evocations of evil in the history of cinema.
And that brings me to why I hated Iron Man 3. In the trailers leading up to the film, audiences were led to believe that the great actor Ben Kingsley was playing the Mandarin, a terrorist. The Mandarin looks like Osama bin Laden, but even more impressive to me was the voice. Kingsley adopts a kind of redneck basso profondo for the part, a menacing and robotic Southern drawl.
Kingsley was in fact doing what Heath Ledger did in his amazing turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight -- using a flat, even goofy accent to ironically intensify the feeling of unfeeling cruelty. It's the opposite of what Mercedes McCambridge did in The Exorcist, but they share the principle that getting the voice right is crucial to playing the bad guy. And the trailers for Iron Man 3 indicated that Kingsley nailed it. I was looking forward to the film just for his performance alone.
And then I actually saw the film. And here's your spoiler: the Mandarin isn't a terrorist at all. He's the creation of a British actor, played by Kingsley, who is hired by bad old Americans to distract from their plot to make money. They want to "own the war on terror" by both creating a breed of super soldier and providing a villain, the Mandarin, to keep people afraid.
In other words, it's the same old liberal Hollywood crap. Because we can't even have a villain who actually looks anything like the people who actually hate us, Hollywood, whether in Avatar or Robert Redford's latest flop, always circles back to the same old lefty bogeyman: the military-industrial complex. It's lazy, it's stupid, it's cowardly, and in Iron Man 3 it robs the audience of what could have been a brilliant performance by Ben Kingsley.
To watch him create the Mandarin and then whiplash the audience with a reveal that shows the character to actually be a silly, dithering British drug addict is to watch a world class talent being slain on the altar of political correctness. It's almost as bad as the emasculation of Jeff Bridges in Barbra Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces, a genuine horror and still one of the most painful films of all time to watch.
To be clear: it would not have bothered me had Marvel and Iron Man 3 director Shane Black just bombarded us with multiple explosions, laughable escapes and the usually summer junk. But Iron Man 3 goes past sucking and into the realm of the tragic. Kingsley grabs us, holds us, then makes us feel like fools.
In The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge was far too dedicated to her craft to have done something so awful. It would have been like revealing halfway through that Regan was not a girl wrestling with the devil, but a drunk midget.
