Upon reflection, I actually think the Mandarin plot twist is problematic for the movie. Not because of any loyalty to the comics version of the Mandarin. Lord no; I've never read an Iron Man comic in my life, and the comics Mandarin seems really really dumb.
No, it's a structural problem. The first half of the movie does a really effective job of building up this shadowy villain, who seems genuinely interesting, and appears to have the cryptic beginnings of a coherent ideology. He's well-acted and threatening and feels like he's going to be the first great Iron Man villain in the MCU. Then they throw all that away on a joke. A really funny joke, and one that I was very taken with at the time. But it's just a joke, and it trashes all that foreshadowing for no long-term gain. The interesting villain is discarded, and as is typical of the Iron Man movies, we are stuck with a boring nonentity of a villain that you can't remember 5 minutes after walking out of the theater. In this case it was... some guy with tattoos? Named Adrian, or something? Honestly, I can't even remember; that's how incredibly boring he was.
Alas, it seems RDJ will never get a memorable villain to defeat in his own franchise.
I never understand this criticism.
The Mandarin that was teased in the trailers, the one you want as described in your post, his ideology, his "threats", were fucking BORING and represented the stale terrorist posturing that embodies practically all theatrical villainy in action movies.
"Heroes, there are no such thing."
"Do you want an empty life, or a meaningful death."
Some dumb phiilosophically vapid shit about fortune cookies.
Give me a break. I'd take what we got over that any day, especially considering that the Mandarin character from the comics, he of eastern philosophy and magic rings, was never interesting to begin with.
I think a lot of people are so wrapped up in the "betrayal" they feel when IM3 pulled the rug from under them that they overlook what the film tried to do with the Mandarin, or what Killian tried to do with the Mandarin.
Killian IS the Mandarin. Yeah, that guy with the dragon tattoos that you're deriding, he's the Mandarin. Or at least, he based parts of his persona on a mythical figure by that name he heard of somewhere along the way to building AIM and developing better tech than Tony. The fake Mandarin? All that grandstanding and those threatening soundbites? Manufactured by Killian to be the kind of threatening presence that the American public would rally against, all the while the real threat operated well out of public focus. His was an entirely new form of terrorism, one that completely subverts expectations. The comic Mandarin is said to be an industrial genius and master tactician, is Killian not that? Strip the Mandarin of his Asian heritage and nobility, what do you get?
So maybe you can complain that it turns out that the villain of this Iron Man movie is another business man in a suit. Well, that's not really a problem when you look at the greater picture. The 3 prominent villains of the Iron Man franchise Obadiah Stane, Justin Hammer, both represent the worst aspects of who Tony was before fate and metal shrapnel forced him off that path -- unscrupulous weapons dealer, immoral hack inventor, respectively.
Killian is even closer to Tony as a character. A twisted mirror image of Tony. He is a man who, by his own ingenuity and willpower, overcame a disability to create an empire like Tony's and managed to beat Tony (albeit temporarily) by doing the one thing that no one thought was possible: he created tech that was better, even more cutting edge than Tony's. It's a tech that Killian relies on, like a crutch. Tony had Iron Man, Killian had Extremis. And the only way Tony could beat Killian was to believe that he was more than his tech, that he, Tony Stark the person, was Iron Man.
That's way more interesting than a vague terrorist who may or may not have any magic powers.
_/¯
