20 Most Ridiculous Moments In The Marvel Cinematic Universe
9. Tony Gets The Shrapnel Removed - Iron Man 3
The Moment: At the end of the movie, Tony Stark heads to China to have surgery to remove the life-threatening shrapnel from his chest.
Why It's Ridiculous: Because the first two movies played up how Tony couldn't get the shrapnel out of his chest and so needed the arc reactor to keep himself alive.
This is then completely disregarded with Iron Man 3's abrupt resolution, which has rightly made a lot of fans ask why he couldn't, with his grand resources, just have this surgery done earlier on and perhaps avoid Iron Man 2's Palladium poisoning altogether?
Marvel's party line would probably be that a) the moment is more about Tony moving on from his demons and starting anew and b) Dr. Wu (who appears more in the Chinese version of the movie) is the only surgeon on Earth who can do it, but both of them are pretty flimsy hand-waiving of some damn lazy writing.