I cannot find anything in depth online about the true facts...Is there true credibility to the notion that they family might have killed and hidden Nicholas? It is left so vague, all you can do is scratch your head. The facts of the thing are so truly mystifying anyway, it would not surprise me I guess. I feel like I really want to know what happened to that kid.

twist with Kingsley as the Madarin just being a farce

I think it was something a member of the family speculated about, but I remember being left with the feeling that it would make a lot of sense. For example, taking in someone who looked and sounded and acted nothing like your son and swearing blindly that he was your long lost son, I sort of imagined it like the Seymour Skinner/Armin Tamzerian bit from the Simpsons

This disappointed me, but I know it's a personal reaction. It absolutely worked within the context of the movie, and for him not to be a fake would have risked him becoming a ridiculous ethnic caricature. But still, to build up the Mandarin to be so big and bad. I wanted something epic between IM and Mandarin. The line from the trailer "Do you want an empty life? Or do you want a meaningful death?" set up my expectations. But again, it's not like the movie fell apart. Simply a disappointment for me that I don't expect others to share.

So exactly what can kill Aldrich Killian? The stuff that killed the other extremis soldiers doesn't phase Aldrich, and the way he's finally killed didn't seem to me any more violent than the explosion that we first thought killed him.

WTF with these suits running out of power? Didn't they establish in IM1 that the suit is powered by the arc reactor? So how is War Machine's suit powered? I'd be fine with Stark having made Rhodey a suit he can wear with an independent power source, but Tony's suit is supposed to run on the arc reactor in his chest. For the suit to run out of power, his chest-reactor would have to fail. This felt like a ridiculous retcon for the sake of suspense. The suit's out of power! I'm going to crash! I'll have to go full MacGuyver and recharge it with a car battery or sumpin'!

Yeah, it begs the question if Tony could have just had the operation to get rid of the shrapnel, why didn't he do that in the first place? Thought that was the dual purpose of the arc reactor.

I'm not a comic book guy but I know the Mandarin has the potential to be a great villain and set up some really epic battles but they didn't use it at all. I guess I'm fine with it because honestly I don't know how they'd resolve both threats of him and Killian simultaneously without making it even more over the top hokey. I also was kind of confused as to how all the extremis soldiers die, like sometimes they heal and sometimes it's too much to come back from? All of these leaps still just make IM1 for me by far the best one of the series.