Courtesy of USA Today comes a photo of Mickey Rourke in his Whiplash costume on the Iron Man 2 set. Rourke plays Ivan Vanko, a Russian man fresh out of prison, who develops his own suit and goes by the monicker Whiplash. His suit powers a pair of whips, and as you can see, appears to use technology similar to Tony Stark’s arc reactor. Jon Favreau says “the technologies are definitely related” and that “that’s part of the core theme of the film.” Hopefully they see that through, because I thought Iron Man dropped the ball on having Stark deal with the impact he’d had on the world with his inventions, especially how even when he decides to change his ways he still designs a weaponized suit and only pays lip service to having his company move into energy innovation. I’d like to see Tony Stark truly face the consequences of what he does with his life and I’m sure that could lead into the inevitable alcoholism plotline. More thoughts about this here.
Iron Man 2 is scheduled for May 7th, 2010 and stars Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johansson. Garry Shandling, Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg, Kate Mara and Jon Favreau will also appear while Paul Bettany returns as the voice of Stark’s computer system JARVIS. Favreau directs again while Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder) wrote the screenplay.
