Minor Plot hole: Since Pepper is a woman, she obviously does not have as much experience as guys hiding her NSFW downloads on her computer. But still, what’s the first and only step to hide your porn downloads when someone passes around the screen ? You minimize that shit. You minimize that shit with dozens of safe-sounding stuff so that your mother would never suspect it. But what does Pepper do to hide her secret download when Obadiah is coming to see what she is up to? She puts on a screensaver. Great job dumb shit. No one ever looks strange when they are looking at a screensaver for several minutes on their computer screen. Nothing fishy about that. Please carry-on movie super-villain – I’m totally not downloading your evil plan on my USB card.
Minor Plot hole: Pepper and the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D know Stane is creating a weaponized suit similar to Stark’s Iron Man and yet they think 6 people armed with crappy PG-13 handguns will be enough to stop him. Genius. Isn’t S.H.I.E.L.D dealing with super technology all the time? It’s like calling the cops to stop a raging flamethrower-wielding coke-addict and see 6 of them trying to circle him like a prey with sausage-bayonets.
Major Plot hole: What exactly is Stane’s plan once he has killed Stark during their final battle? The CIA knows he’s in the suit, so him taking over Stark Industries and manufacturing a powerful arsenal of weaponized suits is impossible because he’ll be jailed or executed the minute he exits his armor. Seriously, the guy’s whole plan was about secrecy and he randomly decides to expose himself to the entire world as a deadly robo-terrorist.
Plot contrivance: Yinsen runs at a gang of armed terrorists with a machine gun and they all flee in terror, completely ignoring the fact that they are trained assassins who also have guns and could have easily killed him straight away.
Plot contrivance: The first suit Stark builds in the cave is shown to have two giant eye holes protected by absolutely nothing. When he took off during a field of flames, how were his eyeballs not roasted to shit?
Plot contrivance: Since we are on the family-friendly topic of disgusting physical trauma, how did Stark survive his rocket fall after he escaped the cave? His limbs should have been flying across the desert like all his other smashed metal suit pieces. But as we learn in this movie, the human body can take the shock of an explosive tank shell and the impact of a 1000 feet fall as long as it’s encased in a metal suit of armor.
Plot contrivance: Tony was super-secretive about the mini arc reactor keeping the metal shards out of his heart. His mini-reactor was like his second penis: no one could touch it aside from Pepper. And yet, his ex-partner turned evil for whatever reason has created the perfect tool to extract that second penis like he had been able to study how big and thick it was beforehand to create a tool that would match it perfectly. How did that happen?
Unaddressed Issue: The terrorists who capture Tony Stark can speak English just fine – well, their leader can at least. Yet they record a video message for Obadiah Stane in their native language and just expect him to translate it, which apparently is as easy as typing TRANSLATE to switch to an English voice over. Couldn’t they just speak English? It was their employer after all.
Unaddressed Issue: During the climax of the film Pepper says Tony will die if she overloads the arc reactor yet he tells her to do it anyway. So of course he doesn’t die but the self-inflicted death penalty seemed to be so unavoidable to begin with it is rather strange to see both of them not even question the fact that it didn’t happen. Especially considering the fact that Obadiah died because of it and not Tony. It can’t be because of the manly mustache – both of them had one.
