On Friday, Marvel unleashed 13 episodes of the first season of Iron Fist on Netflix and upon the world —
and it is the single worst thing the superhero television factory has ever created.
This series takes everything good Marvel has done, takes it on a joy ride, then returns it scratched, bruised, and smelling like patchouli and broken promises. After the 13-hour slog, I'm not angry — I'm just disappointed.
Disappointed, but not particularly surprised
. After all, from concept to release, Iron Fist has been a challenge. He's not really one of Marvel's most compelling heroes. And the original source material is clunky and full of Asian stereotypes — dragons, Orientalist flourishes, and Fu Manchu facial hair.
Prior to Iron Fist's casting of Finn Jones, there was a fan movement to get Marvel to cast Danny Rand as an Asian or Asian-American man.
But even if Marvel did that, and even if it managed to perfect the depictions of Asian people on this show, Iron Fist would still be awful.
Iron Fist's biggest weakness is its writing
The story of Iron Fist, a.k.a Danny Rand— a rich white man (and orphan) who learns martial/mystical arts and returns home to fight evil — isn't unlike those of Batman, Green Arrow, or Doctor Strange, putting the onus on the show to do something interesting with a well-trod narrative. The show is also the last of Marvel's core four Netflix solo series leading up to its Avengers-like team-up show, The Defenders, meaning Iron Fist is tasked with a lot of last-minute place-setting for that series. And perhaps the biggest challenge facing Iron Fist in 2017 is that the source material, written in the '70s, is rife with Orientalist stereotypes, making fans, especially those of Asian descent, wary of what Marvel would do with Iron Fist.
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The bigger challenge facing the show's writers was taking the Iron Fist narrative and making it both digestible and distinct, which they've utterly failed to do. The most consistently disappointing and distracting Iron Fist element is its flat, repetitive writing.
Here's how a typical Iron Fist conversation goes:
Character 1: You did [insert something that the audience just saw happen]
Character 2: I did [the thing character 1 is talking about]
Character 1: That's a bad idea that you [did that thing]
Character 2: I am this thing, that did that thing. This is what I'm feeling right now.
Repeat that over and over, and you've basically got yourself one season of Iron Fist. On multiple occasions in any given episode, characters will just say plainly how they feel. Half of the first part of the season is Danny Rand saying ”I can explain" over and over, to the point where it begins to feel like a threat.
The clunky dialogue often creates the sense that the show doesn't trust its audience. After Danny gets into a fight at Rand HQ, the camera lingers on the head security guard. Later in the episode, the same security guard pursues Danny, to which he exclaims ”Hey, you're that security guard from earlier!" as if we'd somehow forgotten what's happened in the last 20 minutes.
But perhaps that's the thing: No character on this show seems to remember what just happened.
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The fight choreography is aggressively uninteresting
When I first watched Daredevil's first season, I was taken by how the show's fight scenes had a language of their own. Each character fought differently: Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil, had an acrobatic precision to his style, which contrasted with Wilson Fisk's brutish, raw power. In the second season, the series developed this language even further, with Elektra's agile style and Punisher's brutal violence. The series' visual style reflected this dynamism, experimenting with heights and angles in fight scenes to great effect.
Sadly, there's absolutely none of that in Iron Fist.
Granted, there's also a lack of great fight choreography in Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, the two Netflix solo series preceding Iron Fist, but those two shows aren't centered on martial arts and acrobatic fighting the way Iron Fist is. The fights here look generic, to the point where if you told me they were actually footage from the '90s Power Rangers series, I would believe you.
Everyone fights the same, and no one looks interesting doing it.
Some of this can be attributed to Danny Rand's lack of mask or bandana. Thanks to Daredevil's costuming, a stuntperson could step in for actor Charlie Cox, providing the show the freedom to visually experiment. Meanwhile, Iron Fist's action sequences want to make clear that we're actually seeing Finn Jones doing some of the punching. But the drawback to that verisimilitude is that the scenes feel choppy and redundant — a style Marvel should be long past at this point. A slapdash assassin tournament midway through the season makes it especially evident how the series uses its fight scenes like a cudgel instead of a paintbrush.
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Iron Fist is almost entirely without merit. Almost.
Watching the entire season of Iron Fist left me at the crossroads of fatigue and boredom. I went into this show a young, spry man. I left with rickets and a pocket full of Werther's Originals.
At multiple points, I yelled at my screen because another character told us something we just saw happen. And somewhere around episode 8, Jones's moribund performance led me to Google ”handsome actors martial arts training." (I then found myself on a Cam Gigandet Pinterest board.)
But within Iron Fist's relentless mediocrity, there are a couple of lone bright spots. They go by the names of Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) and Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), both previously introduced into the Marvel-Netflix television universe in prior series. Here, they're sardonic voices of reason, pragmatic figures to help Danny Rand understand the cynicism and the way the world around him (which he's been removed from for 15 years) works.
A lot of my affection for these two comes from their constant undercutting of the people around them. Like a salty Greek chorus, Jeri and Claire repeatedly sharpen their faces and give Danny and Colleen a ”you've got to be kidding me" stare that captures all the annoyance and frustration the viewer is feeling at their antics. Or, because this is a poorly written show, sometimes they give that stare and then actually say, ”You've got to be kidding me!"
This might be the fatigue talking, but Marvel should really think about a spinoff for these two. It couldn't be any worse than the 13 hours I just watched.
