Iron Man 3 (2013)

Iron Man 3 was written and directed by Shane Black, and co-written by Drew Pierce; Pierce who wrote and directed the follow up MCU one-shot, has gone on record to state that the short was an intended apology to the avid reader/fan with their misleading portrayal of the Mandarin.

Shane Black who began his career in the 80's as a successful screenplay writer, has transitioned into a more auteur director. His first time helming a big budget motion picture was the film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang  which co-starred Robert Downey Jr.   It was that friendship and relationship with Downey Jr. that help facilitate a meeting with Marvel Studio to pitch his idea for Iron Man 3. When it became clear Jon Favreau had decided to step down as it's director. 

Keeping with one of the themes he has normally explores in his big budget action movies, 'the damaged hero', he provides a learning arc within his stories.  Black is not so different from Stephen King who uses the youth as the spring board to enter us into the world that they have devised, Shane Black from his first published screenplay with Monster Squad to The Predator, sees a child displaced as a guide to our hero,
The Virgil to our Dante Alighieri.

The young boy Harley, to whom fans were divisively mixed on, brought a different layer to the Tony Stark's Character, Removing Stark from the immediate foil of the story, Harley allows Tony to pursue 3 things;  become a detective, solving the mysterious catalyst of the Mandarin explosives.  Recalibrating Tony;  going back to the beginning like in the cave, being an inventor and  working though his problem with post-traumatic stress disorder by taking control without the suit to stop the Mandarin.

And finally, remembering who he was; well before Bern, Switzerland. when he was just an innocent child, a person with wonder and desire to learn and excel.  Tony sees himself in Harley, and has indirectly mentored the young boy; that elusive father figure that Tony has struggled with his whole life.
This is not a perfect story,  Tony communicates to Pepper through a secure line in the Iron Man helmet, but does not tell Pepper where he is exactly. He has travelled across 4 States from Malibu to Rose Hill, Tennessee. Maya Hansen was with Pepper, but even if Maya had learned through Pepper on the  whereabouts of Tony's location; that was still hours after the initial assault on the Malibu home, Tony had landed in Tennessee and was in motion towards finding Harley, the sudden appearance of the Extremis operatives localized in Rose Hill, that same evening  as Tony just arrived and began investigating the Mandarin attack is virtually impossible from any logistical stand point. There is a subtle hint to Man-Thing, in regards to Advance Idea Mechanics involvement to a widow, in Tennessee, but the film retcons that story to be more about Extremis experimentations. When the widow hands Tony secret documents that could reveal the plot of this story, which by the way the villains apparently already knew for a number of months, but only decided to come for it at that precise moment.

The best concept was trojan horsing the President; A.I.M. helped with weaponizing the iron patriot suit, and it would have made sense to creating a schematic plan to take control of that one and only Mech Suit of Tony's to be used to kidnap the US President.  The final act which enlists the house party protocol, a negative aspect of over inventing as a result of PTSD is a dizzying battle between an active militia of Extremis soldiers and roughly 35 Mech suits. The rules of how to kill an Extremis soldier is ill define, they can survive a large seismic explosion at the Chinses restaurant but not a microwave explosion. A soldier can grow any lost limbs in mere seconds and regenerate from extreme trauma, like a large water tower impaling them, but a large repulsor ray through the chest can kill them.

Sir Ben Kinglsey,  as actor Trevor Slattery, portraying terrorist leader The Mandarin, was both comical and insightful (I'm the dude, playing a dude, playing another dude).  The initial Iron Man movie  was released several years after the 9/11; the Ten Rings Cave where Tony was captured  was in Afghanistan, straddling the line of the real world.  Iron Man 3 does point out real world facts under bad situations, but draws on our extended imagination which may not always be the case as it was revealed when locating Bin Laden it was though his online searching for porn that got him discovered. That demystifying reality was imbedded in this movie to allow us, the viewer to accept the surprise reveal of the Mandarin, This too was used in masking failed Extremis experimentations  on military sites as A.I.M. was looking to establish government contracts, but spun those classified meetings as a Mandarin attack for a misdirect.