Across the past ten issues, this comic has tried to be both an espionage book along the lines of Invincible Iron Man as well as an action book (which you would expect from a series titled “War Machine”).  Rhodey has been exposing corruption and illegal white collar arrangements, which are protected by Ultimo-style tech.  Hence, the spying and the big bashing scenes.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t really clicked–and now it comes to an end.  The story line has been quite complex and giving it just a couple issues to wind down is rushed.

Rhodes, looking like D.C.’s Cyborg, has been captured by Norman Osborn to be put on trial for all the things he’s done uncovering all the corruption.  And where there are trials, there is defense attorney Matt Murdock.  Rhodey fires him, though–so it’s just a pointless cameo–as he moves through some also-pointless courtroom shenanigans that represent Rhodey’s stalling tactics before his master plan can come to fruition.

His extended cast (called, “Team War Machine”) steal Rhodes’ clone body.  Suzi Endo  wirelessly transfers Rhodes from his War Machine body to his clone.  Osborn has even slicker triple-cross that enables him to still be a hero but also gets James Rhodes pardoned of all charges and gets to end his series showing love from his mommy and wearing the armor he started it in.

All in all, it’s a plot-heavy ending to a plot-heavy series that was never really bad but, sadly, also never really good.  Also, this book did take Rhodes through some fairly major changes–he became a cyborg able to assimilate tech, an international antihero, and assembled a team of experts to help accomplish pretty heavy duty justice.  But in the end, he’s just reset to where he started.  I know that’s par for the course with Marvel, but given that War Machine has never successfully been a starring character, it seems like they could have made some of those changes more permanent.