Based on the box office totals, every American man, woman, and child saw Iron Man 3 twice this weekend. I wrote a spoiler-free review of the movie for this week's paper, but after the jump, I'd like to talk about the movie without fear of ruining anything for anybody. If you've already seen Iron Man 3, click the link after the trailer and follow me into spoiler-ville:

I love, love, love how annoyed the hard-core message-board fanboys are at the revelation that Ben Kingsley's Mandarin is an idiot actor paid to portray an Osama bin Laden-like terrorist threat. (Check the comment thread on this interview with Iron Man 3 director Shane Black to see what I mean. Also, read Harry Knowles's dumb theory about how the twist is a setup, and that Kingsley's character was really in charge the whole time, to see how deep fanboy denial can really go.) I don't think I'm alone in saying that I loved the twist, on a couple different levels. First of all: I agree with Black that there's pretty much no way to do The Mandarin straight-up without making him a racist yellow peril caricature. Or, even if you were to somehow thread that needle, the Mandarin's ten magic rings are a stupid idea for a power. I loved how the big bad guy being an empty figurehead resonated perfectly with the movie's empty-suit themes.

But more importantly, The Mandarin felt like a much-needed icepick to the ridiculously powerful evil genius villain that's become a trend in movies over the last few years. Ever since Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, these sorts of intense masterminds have gotten a little too perfect. Once you take away the Mandarin, with his lessons and his "deep" moral ambiguity, you've got Guy Pearce, a greedy sonofabitch with flaws and strengths. He's smart, and he's got a plan, yes, but he's ultimately just another man who wants money, and who wants to make the good guy pay for making him feel powerless this one time. Some have complained that Pearce's character was too small a threat, but I thought that was perfect for what the movie was trying to do.

Other than the Mandarin, I have a few random thoughts:

• I do regret that this is Don Cheadle's second Iron Man movie, and he's still basically relegated to a minor kid sidekick role. He's too good an actor to be stuck there. I'd like to see him take charge at some point, rather than get tossed around by everyone else.

• I enjoyed that Gwyneth Paltrow had her moment in the sun. I'm not generally a fan of every supporting character in a comic book getting super-powers, but in the movies, where the threats to the supporting cast somehow feel more real and more dangerous, I think it worked. It's too bad her powers were handwaved away.

• A lot of people are complaining about the fact that Tony Stark had surgery to remove the life-threatening shrapnel all of a sudden, since that same surgery was impossible back during the first movie. But this is a movie about technological advancements; it's not a deus ex machina to say that technology advanced to the point where the impossible became possible at the end of an iron Man movie. It's practically the point of an Iron Man movie.

• The comics fans (well, the more literate ones) were calling Black's Mandarin twist "cynical." But I thought Black's most cynical point in the movie was just after the Air Force One rescue scene, when he reveals that Tony Stark was never in the Iron Man suit that rescued all those people. It's the emotional high point of the film, and the hero was never in physical jeopardy. But again, I thought the cynicism of a remote rescue worked with the movie's themes and actually retroactively raised the stakes; imagine how crushed Stark would've been if he couldn't save everyone. He'd have spent the rest of his life wondering if his physical presence could've made a difference.

• And, finally: Spielberg should take tips on how to handle children from Black. The little boy Stark befriends in Tennessee was absolutely perfect: He was a brat and a manipulator and still an awestruck kid in over his head. He was a human being, not the idealized li'l angels that Spielberg always tosses into his movies.