Ivan, who has the means to create his own Iron Man, embarks on a revenge trip that begins spectacularly when he confronts Tony on the track of the Monaco grand prix. Returned home, he was incarcerated in the gulag and died of drink in Putin's squalid Moscow. Ivan's dad was a brilliant Soviet scientist who defected to the west only to be unjustly accused of espionage by Stark Sr. Hanging over Tony Stark, as with most American heroes, is the shadow of a father who, he thinks, didn't love or appreciate him. He acts like Rasputin, has the technical skills of a professor at the USSR Academy of Sciences and has cold war issues to settle.
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Not unlike the bizarre commie villains Sylvester Stallone confronted as Rocky and Rambo, Mickey Rourke's Ivan Vanko is a disfigured, tattooed giant from the same cracked mould that produced the shambling loser Rourke played in The Wrestler.
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Meanwhile, having established Tony as an impeccable combination of patriotism and capitalism, the movie sets the scene for a replay of the cold war by introducing a wild Russian mirror-image of the American superhero. The Washington hearing is modelled on an actual event just after the second world war when Howard Hughes faced down his political critics, an incident also celebrated in Scorsese's equally Hughes-aggrandising The Aviator. In this, he has the covert support of a close friend, the handsome black soldier Lt Col Rhodes (Don Cheadle). Then, when he's called to Washington to appear before a Senate committee presided over by the deviously smarmy Senator Stern (Garry Shandling), he refuses to hand over the Iron Man equipment to the government on the grounds that it's better developed by private enterprise. The cleverest spokesman for the arms business since Bernard Shaw's Undershaft in Major Barbara, he presents his company in a showbiz-style exposition in New York with a chorus of dancing girls joining lethal weapons on stage, all in the interest of world peace. Tony more or less adopts the motto of the Strategic Air Command that in the 1960s Bertrand Russell thought so ironically amusing: "Peace is our profession".
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The big political juggling act of Iron Man 2 is how to get the extensive support that the producers need from the Department of Defence and the top brass at the Pentagon and yet retain Tony's position as a maverick genius. So how does Tony progress and develop? Well, it could be said that he's been shaped to please the right-wing critics of Avatar. The secret identity that he attained, in the manner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Superman, Batman, Spiderman et al, by devising the impregnable flying suit that made him Iron Man, was blown before the end of the first cinematic blockbuster, which appeared two years ago. Rather, he's a handsome, eccentric, technological genius, clearly based on Howard Hughes, who has inherited from his father (appropriately named Howard Stark) a vast business specialising in, among other things, state-of-the-art military weapons and turned it into a concern worth billions. In his private life, if that is what it can be called, Tony (being impersonated for the second time on screen by Robert Downey Jr), is no retiring, bespectacled Clark Kent or shy schoolboy Peter Parker. T ony Stark, the creation of Marvel Comics in 1963 and the subject of 600 issues of Iron Man magazine, is a curious superhero.