The potential race issues, I guess?

I'm hating having to resist the white font!

Oh I have no clue. Mike's just who I think of in terms of premiere male stuntman of the current generation, so it seems a shame.

I did see Zoe Bell's name in the credits, so they definitely had top-notch talent working the stunts.

Liese,

I understand your concern. I do not think your concern on that score is warranted.

Liese, remember that this movie got a lot of money (effectively) from foreign concerns. The thing you are worrying about would have totally obviated that. It's not even teased.

OK, so I saw it. That was Hella Fun.

And my take on one of the outstanding questions is that Pepper is stabilized, not depowered. It's (a) more interesting from a narrative perspective; (b) puts her on a more equal footing with Tony; and (c) means she's way less at risk in the future, since she's basically invulnerable.

And I loved the Mandarin reveal. That was some good trolling. Well played, indeed.

I do agree with someone's question upthread, which is that not ALL the Extremis soldiers should have been onboard with killing the President & Iron Man and all. They didn't join the program for unsavory reasons, after all. Also, the data that Tony found was on the NSA servers: that program was closely coordinated with the federal government. It's hard to believe nobody other than Tony ever saw the connection between Davis & Extremis.

Why would we think that all of Extremis was on board? In fact, since he's created Mandarin to cover his oopsies, we know that most of the problem (the first guy and the Mann's Chinese guy at the very least) were not shown to be on anti-government. For all we know, there are a bunch more Peppers, and the only people that get let out to fight for him were the loyal ones, the ones he bribed with walking/playing ping pong again. All we were shown is that a number larger than zero but smaller than than the total fit that profile.

Hmm, good point, ita. We don't know how many Extremis people there were. But that's a lot a lot of test subjects, if the fighters Tony & Rhodey were dealing with were only some of them. And I don't see how the NSA didn't know that there was this fairly significant flaw in the program (where they blow up!), if AIM was getting their subjects from the government.

Plot hole, anyway.

Based on the military hardware used to knock Tony's home into the Malibu surf, I'm guessing that the VP was pulling a lot of strings on Killian's behalf. Maybe he was pink-slipping or otherwise dealing with intelligence directors who put the pieces of the puzzle together?

I'm always amused by opening weekends like this:

1. Iron Man 3 $175M
2. Pain & Gain $7.6M