This was just a terrible, terrible way to start off Phase 2. The twist with Mandarin was horrible and disrespectful to any average comic book fan let alone people who have never read them, considering they set him up as the villain in all the promo material.

If you can ignore the Mandarin copout, the writing has serious flaws that are courtesy of many ideas they tried to cramp into the story and it fails to deliver on all fronts. Tony Stark trying to win the war against Mandarin by only using his head was botched and was only a plot point for 10-20 minutes. Extremis plotline felt extremely simplified and underwhelming. And finally, the final part in which [SPOILERS] Tony goes into surgery to get the shrapnels out of his chest area completely destroyed one of the established features/traits of Tony Stark. They already stated that it was impossible for those shrapnels to be extracted in the first movie. Why completely go against that? The whole "being under constant threat of death" thing was what made Stark relatable to the viewer. He was the genius who could build things people can't even dream of... who also couldn't save himself from constant threat of death regardless of his genius.

tl;dr the movie fails to deliver because of one horribly forced twist to surprise the comic book readers and because of having too many ideas cramped into the movie at once.

Oh and great review.

The reviewer hails this as such an atrocity. Not many other reviews did that, so I don't take this one much seriously.