The Specialists

If you were anywhere near the Internet yesterday, you probably saw the teaser trailer for Iron Man 3. In case you missed it, here it is:

Overall, I think it looks pretty good. The dark tone is a nice contrast with the first two, and I like that the events of The Avengers are still being being felt in the second round of films. Marvel has done an outstanding job of tying their movies together in a single shared universe.

I’m not sure what to think of Sir Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin. Of course, The Mandarin is a problematic character to begin with. A faithful translation from the comics would most likely be offensively racist, so it’s not surprising that they didn’t get an Asian actor for the role. But I’m not really sure what they’re going for here. The brief glimpse of the character shown in this teaser reminds me of one of the dwarves from The Hobbit. And the narration is… odd. Also, although Kingsley is an amazing actor, he’s not above hamming it up in terrible B movies, so we’ll have to see what kind of movie he thinks he’s in.

So far, third installments in superhero franchises have a pretty poor track record. Sure, The Dark Knight Rises was good, but let’s not forget Spider-Man 3 and X-Men: The Last Stand. I have high hopes for Iron Man 3, but there’s a part of me that’s afraid it will be a giant fiasco.