There is - and always has been - something inherently irksome about Gwyneth Paltrow, save for one performance in David Fincher's Se7en, where she managed to make what could have been an expositional girlfriend character into a nice human being who we all cared about. In general, though, Paltrow is the sort of actress whose name alone gets people riled up, and although her take on Pepper Potts across three Iron Man film isn't bad per se, there's something irritating about the way she delivers her lines and bosses Tony about. Pepper Potts is a great character, of course, and this isn't a dig at the fictional creation as much as it is the actress who embodies her: it's hard to escape the fact that, whenever Potts is on screen, the sense of "fun" is drained from the movie as words like "responsibility" and "control yourself, Tony" are thrown around. Granted, her purpose mostly seems to consist of getting Iron Man to stop indulging himself, which is fine, we guess... but having one character fulfilling that purpose on their own... well, it just makes people say: "Ugh, Pepper, stop."
