The Single Biggest Mistake Each MCU Film Has Made
16. Iron Man 3: Pointless Subplots
The Movie:
As the first film following The Avengers, this had a big task of following that up but it exceeded all our expectations. Written and directed by Shane Black, this is a highly-refined buddy-cop movie but it's also just as thrilling, funny and charming as you'd expect from Marvel.
The Mandarin twist was completely brilliant. Glad we got that out of the way quickly.
Away from that, there are a couple of mistakes. Firstly, there's the plot being set-off by Stark giving the Mandarin his address on live TV, which is genuinely the stupidest decision in film history, and secondly, it shows a general MCU problem of too many plot elements.
Iron Man 3 is generally delightful, but there are moments where the momentum seems to drop off; it really could've benefited from a little bit of streamlining here and there.
For example, all the time Stark spends hanging with Harley the young kid doesn't add that much to the film and slows everything down. Similarly, Maya Hansen is a useless secondary villain and a criminal waste of Rebecca Hall. It would've been nice if the superfluous elements such as these had been left on the cutting room floor.
Luckily, despite these pointless detours IM3 delivers a good-enough finale to compensate.
Fix:
Cut the amount of time Tony spends hanging out with the kid, since this subplot doesn't add much to the movie.