Iron Man 2 will be released soon and I have noticed that it falls into the Die Hard, Rambo, and every other action movie ever made category. For those that don't know Iron Man is the story of billionaire Tony Stark (in this case actor Robert Downey Jr) who is forced to build a futuristic suit of armor for terrorists. After escaping the terrorists, Stark then decides to use the suit to protect the world from different evils. Iron Man 2 picks up where the first movie left off. The world knows Tony Stark is Iron Man and he must now deal with the trials and tribulations of being a superhero. Not that you know what's different about the story let me tell you what hasn't changed. Iron Man 2, like every other action movie, is all about race. The movie perpetuates many different racial stereotypes that other movies do. The first stereotype involves the hero. Tony Stark, like most action stars, is a white male with the privileges of looks, money, intelligence, strength, or whatever else makes up a hero. This idea of the true hero needing to be a white male is nothing new in the history of action movies. This stereotype portrays the white male as the one with true dominant masculinity. The next stereotype revolves around the use of Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes who is played by Don Cheadle. This stereotype is that the African American heroes could only have gotten where they are with help from the white characters. This movie continues that stereotype through Rhodey. Rhodey dawns another suit built by Stark and becomes his sidekick War Machine. This continues to perpetuate that belief that minority action heroes could not get where they are without the white characters. The last stereotype is the foreigner as villain one. The character of Ivan Vanko played by Mickey Rourke fills this void. Vanko is the son of a soviet physicist who builds futuristic laser whips to attack Stark with. This character has a Russian accent and is portrayed as barbaric (spends most of the fight scenes without a shirt on) and evil because he is attacking the true patriot Stark. This continues to give others the image that foreigners are evil. So as you can see the media has produced another action movie filled with stereotypes from everyday America. Does this produce a winning formula for a movie? Would changing this formula hurt the movie industry? Is this what we as Americans wanna see or are we forced to watch this because there is nothing else? Watch the trailer and tell me what you think.
I saw Ironman 2 the day after it came out, and I have to agree that the Russian villain, Ivan Vanko, came off as way too much. The accent, the long hair, the shirtlessness, and his obsession with his pet bird definitely added nothing to the plot and made the character look savage and barbaric. There was a lot of sexism in this movie as well, from the dancing half-naked women in the opening scene (they served no purpose at all) to Scarlet Johannson's character as a whole. When she mixed IronMan a martini and then proceed to ask him if it was “dirty enough for him,” I almost spat out my popcorn. Who do they think they're kidding? You had to be nearly brainless to enjoy that movie.
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