Typically, the likeness of a movie star face when sculpted into the dinky wee visage of an action figure is pretty darn poor. For one thing, the figure manufacturers might not have been granted the rights to use the actor’s face and for another, most of these things seem to be badly designed and very badly built.

Surprisingly, this toy version of Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2’s War Machine get up pretty much knocked me over backwards and right into the uncanny valley with its vivid likeness. To be fair, it is an overpriced figure in a “Don’t touch that!” line for kids who never grew up, not an actual, honest to goodness, down in the dirt candidate for Andy’s Room so perhaps standards have to be higher. I don’t really know - I don’t really know anything much about action figures.

After the break, the full scan which includes his “Armor Assembly Station” and cute little blurb.

Kudos to Rich at awesome comics site Bleeding Cool for getting these scans from the Diamond comics catalogue. Diamond did the blacking out, not Rich.

Now, if only this thing could do Cheadle’s accent from the Ocean’s series, or maybe impersonate his turn as Petey Green from Talk to Me, then I’d think about buying one.

A gold star to the first person to photoshop an image of Terrence Howard into the little toy’s helmet, properly plastic-look filtered and all.

Since this toy looks so convincingly like Cheadle, I can’t help thinking about the payment question here. It was widely reported that the Iron Man 2 pay packets were rather less… abundant than might have been expected. Is the shortfall going to be made up by royalties on merchandise sales?

I can’t wait to see the little plastic replicas of Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell. Maybe with a bit of paint and judicious use of a nail file one could make their own Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson and Sam Bell(s).