Iron Fist (2017-Present)

Okay, so here’s what happened with me and Iron Fist.  I got through the first two episodes, which took some doing.  I looked on IMDb to find out when this much-lauded Zhou Cheng was going to show up and discovered that he was only in a single episode (and Shang-Chi isn’t in it at all – not sure how I saw the story that he was going to be on the show but missed the news that he actually wasn’t.)  At that point, I decided to take The Nerds of Color up on their recommendations for Into the Badlands, devoured the first season on Netflix, and happily caught up on the new season on AMC.  This was excellent in terms of general life decisions but not in terms of watching Iron Fist, because if it was a bit of a slog before seeing the glorious action scenes on Into the Badlands, it was a lot harder after.  I got myself to episode 8 waiting for Zhou Cheng’s appearance, and I motivated myself through the rest with the prospect of a podcast I like that had a couple episodes talking about the show.

I won’t say much more about the show’s handling of race and the whole casting discussion around Danny right now – I’ll save the brunt of that for another post.  I am aware that my feelings on that front, and the circumstances listed above, color how I view the show.  But even apart from that, I have no great love for Iron Fist, and if it weren’t for my completist nature, I might not have finished the season.  It does improve somewhat as it goes on, but all in all, it ranks a very distant fourth for me in Marvel’s Netflix shows (premise spoilers.)

Danny Rand, long presumed dead since he and his parents went down in a plane crash in the Himalayas, returns to his native New York after 15 years spent in a monastery in the mysterious K’un L’un.  He’s eager to reclaim the company that bears his name, but he’s been out of the world for a long time and has developed too trusting a nature to comfortably navigate a cutthroat business environment.  Matters are further complicated by his role as the Iron Fist, a legendary “living weapon” status bestowed only on K’un L’un’s most esteemed protectors, and when he discovers that K’un L’un’s sworn enemy the Hand is at work in New York, he vows to stop them.

From a straight storytelling standpoint, Iron Fist commits a few major sins.  Danny is a really frustrating character:  almost criminally naïve, all over the map when it comes to his motivation, and much more “tell” than “show” when it comes to main character traits (i.e., much is made of his K’un L’un training and “total control” over his emotions, but he spends significant chunks of the season in near meltdown.)  All of it adds up to make him the least interesting person on his own show, and while the writing is the main offender here, Finn Jones’s performance doesn’t have enough spark to overcome those deficiencies for me.  Meanwhile, the series fails to find a solid theme or cohesive story to carry it through the season.  There are multiple villains that are spread out a bit disjointedly, and it’s hard to get a handle on what Danny’s ultimate goals are, because they seem to be constantly shifting.  Plus, for a superhero show, the first half of the season feels really heavy on business deals and boardroom scenes.  Not that a hero’s civilian life has no place in the story, but these sequences can drag quite a bit.

And yeah, a lot of the fight scenes are really lackluster.  Since Danny only sporadically uses his actual Iron Fist powers, it’s vital to sell him as being formidable because he’s insanely good at kung fu, and the show never really convinces me of that.  Jones doesn’t look comfortable or fluid performing martial arts, and Danny seems to win many of his fights by writer fiat rather than by demonstrating why his skills exceed that of his opponent.  It’s true that after the stunningly-executed martial arts fighting on Into the Badlands, the show was almost bound to disappoint on this front, but it doesn’t make sense when the most compelling/exciting/impressive combat moments in the show come from characters other than the explicitly-identified living weapon.  Colleen has some really nice fight sequences, and by the end of the season, the fight with Zhou remained my favorite.  Not only is Lewis Tan, who plays Zhou, an experience martial artist, but it’s one of the few fights on the show that’s shot in daylight (making it much easier to see,) and seeing Zhou fight drunken style adds personality, flair, and humor to the proceedings.

As I said, there are good things to be found here.  I really enjoy Colleen and Jessica Henwick’s grounded performance, I wanted a lot more of Zhou, and Davos, played by Sacha Dhawan (former History Boy alert!), brings an interesting angle to the proceedings and made me more interested in K’un L’un.  Additionally, on the business side of the story, the Meachums’ plotline picks up quite a bit in the second half of the season (especially for Tom Pelphrey’s Ward,) and Claire Temple, Jeri Hogarth, and Madame Gao all show up from previous Marvel shows to do their thing.  For me, though, the sloppy writing issues, the mostly-mediocre fight scenes, and most of all, the disengaging protagonist, keep the good parts from coming together into a satisfying whole.

Warnings

Strong violence, language, sexual content, drinking/drug use, and thematic elements.