1) The Mandarin Isn’t The Mandarin
Yes, it’s been four years now, but we’re still not over what Iron Man 3 did to the Mandarin. Fans had been waiting for years to see Tony Stark’s nemesis make it to the movies and, in the end, he was made into the butt of a joke with his legacy probably forever tarnished.
What’s so terrible about this plot twist is that, even more so than the Bane reveal, it tears up all the good work up to that point. For the first half of the movie, the Mandarin was a shoe-in to be one of the MCU’s best villains… and then it’s revealed that he’s actually an actor, with Guy Pearce’s forgettable Aldrich Killian pulling the strings.
Sure, there’s a valid argument to be made that Marvel could not simply lift the, let’s face it, dated Asian stereotype of the Mandarin from the comics and had to find a way to reinterpret him. However, the problem is that they had already found a perfect way of doing that. At first, Kingsley’s Mandarin seems to be a self-styled terrorist who’s appropriated Asian culture for his own image.
Though a subsequent One Shot mini-movie attempted to convince us that there was a real Mandarin still out there in the shadows, the damage had already been done. What a shame!