Despite the Iron Man films basically being vehicles to showcase Tony Stark's best Robert Downey Jr. impression, Pepper Potts actually takes up a surprisingly decent amount of screen time. This wouldn't be so bad had Pepper been a fun and interesting character, but unfortunately, Gwyneth Paltrow seems to have lost all of her Oscar-winning talents when she was cast. Pepper doesn't exactly have the biggest role in the comic books beyond being brilliant as Stark's assistant, meaning that there was room for Paltrow to give some more substance to a character who grounds and humanises Tony Stark. With uninspired readings of lines such as 'there's only 8,011 things that I really need to talk to you about' and 'I quit. I'm resigning. My body literally can't handle the stress', what Paltrow did instead was turn Pepper Potts into a boring and uninteresting character who basically exists to be annoying and to remind Stark that he's being a douche. At almost no point does Paltrow infuse Pepper with any semblance of brilliance beyond shooting quips whenever some 'humour' is needed, so it's quite difficult to see what makes Pepper so 'special' in Stark's eyes when she is really quite a nothing character who is mostly a damsel in distress. Paltrow's bland and irksome take on Pepper is so unremarkable that it was difficult to get excited when the character got some actual powers in Iron Man 3. You can't help but feel Gwyneth is in the film because they needed some additional star power in case the first Iron Man movie flopped.
My life story is nothing special. I haven't cured ebola, I'm nowhere near stopping terrorism, and I'm still working on that climate change problem.
Instead, all I've done so far is put a few hundred words together in an attempt to make people laugh.
You can follow me at @Fry_ying_pan but don't be offended if I don't tweet back. It's usually because I've spent too long trying to think up a witty response that the reply window has closed.
