This isn't a beef with Sir Ben Kingsley - you get the impression that he's the type to respond to criticism by writing very long, very passive-aggressive letters and hand-delivering them to critics' houses, and I've no interest in subjecting myself to that - it's more a beef with the unsatisfying switcheroo of the villains in Iron Man 3, wherein Kingsley is revealed to be a patsy for the real Big Bad: Aldrich Killian. I desperately wanted Kingsley's Mandarin to be the proper Mandarin. He's so thunderously, sonorously evil, with a better grip of the dynamics of how terrorism is meant to work as a means of leverage than the Joker ever had (step one: don't leave the final decision over whether gets blown up to the people who are about to get blown up) and a really uncanny similarity to Islamic State's MO; he's a really thorough fusing of old-style campy megalomania with modern asymmetric tactics. So that's why it was underwhelming to have him snatched from us and replaced by a bang-average robo-hunk type. Yeah, the big reveal scene was pretty funny, but having invested so much in the idea that Kingsley was The Man, I just didn't really give a toss about Killian.
