Iron Fist: A Most Unremarkable Specimen

I’m a huge fan of the Marvel Netflix Universe. Ever since I saw Episode 4 of Season 1 of Daredevil last year, when Wilson Fisk goes from awkwardly courting a sexy art gallery owner to chopping off a Russian gangster’s head in the door of his car, I was entranced.

My opinions on the four shows are pretty widely held. Jessica Jones is my favorite, for the incredible plot, great villain, and the character of Jessica herself, who I love to watch. She’s such a beautiful trainwreck of a human. If you haven’t seen the show, picture Krysten Ritter (you know, the druggie girl from Breaking Bad who was Q’s daughter) playing a self-loathing version of Wolverine. Transplanting that gritty tough guy personality to a woman was brilliant, too; it really makes you think about the way double standards work in media representation. People look at it differently if a grizzled tough guy with a permanent five-o’-clock shadow like Wolverine guzzles alcohol and sleeps around than if a nice-looking young woman like Jessica does, and Jessica lives out the consequences of this in-universe. I loved the character so much that I bought all the collected editions of the Alias comic series where she debuted. Comics Jessica is older, a bit more collected, and slightly more emotionally mature than TV Jessica. Her sarcasm in the comics feels more a product of abiding cynicism than the emotional wreckage and self-loathing that seems to trigger it on TV. We get to see her caring side more often in the comics, the side of her that shows that, as broken and cynical as she is, she does still give a fuck about people. Also, she has an off-again on-again relationship with Ant-Man throughout the run of the comics. This is funny in the MCU context, the idea of Scott Lang, one of the lightest characters in the cinematic universe, in a relationship with Jessica Jones, one of the darkest.

As for the rest, I like Daredevil second best. I prefer Season 1 to Season 2; Season 2 had higher highs, but also lower lows. I liked Luke Cage a lot as a character, but his show suffered for lack of a great villain and some plotting and pacing issues, despite its great style and music. I’m not a fan of hip hop or R&B, but even I thought Luke Cage had a great soundtrack; for the way it brings the viewer into Harlem, it deserves praise.

The interesting thing about the Netflix MCU is that up to this point, the shows were not only beloved by fans but also by mainstream critics, and not in that “Yeah, it’s a shallow, noisy movie, but it’s fun and there are worse things out there you could be sitting through” way that the Marvel films get. All three of the shows until Iron Fist got genuine critical love. Luke Cage and Jessica Jones got the most for the smart ways they handled social themes around being black or female in America today, but Daredevil was also praised for having an exciting, well-crafted story with a great villain. While its social themes weren’t as obvious as Luke Cage or Jessica Jones, I still think Daredevil Season 1 had some nice examination of issues around social class and gentrification, and you could read the fog of mystery around Wilson Fisk as a metaphor for the ability of political actors in the modern day to spend massive amounts of money pushing their ideologies while hidden behind a smoke screen of front corporations, institutes, charities, and think tanks.

The critical love ended with Iron Fist, though. Not one critic I’ve seen had any words of praise at all for it. And I honestly can’t say I blame them. While I don’t think Iron Fist is as bad as it’s often been made out to be, it’s also not really good in any sense. The story is painfully slow moving, the fights are boring and badly staged, and interesting character traits and plot elements are forgotten or thrown aside in favor of uninteresting ones. The whole show has the feeling of a hurriedly made stepping stone on the way to The Defenders, the big Avengers-style crossover between the heroes of the four Netflix shows (which I’m eagerly looking forward to; if you thought Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America had trouble getting along, wait until you get these four people in a room together. I’m predicting a scene where Danny Rand says something stupidly naive and Jessica Jones goes off on him and tells him how it really is, while Luke Cage shakes his head sadly and Matt Murdock looks uncomfortable and impatient).

You can pretty much split the problems with Iron Fist into four categories: the plot, the characters, the action scenes, and the social themes (or lack thereof). Yeah, that’s all the categories. Pretty much nothing in this show actually stands out as amazing, and all the aspects of it have some problems.

The Plot

—is boring and slow as fuck. Granted, it is not the most boring thing I’ve ever watched. I did manage to make it through the entire series. I only made it through one episode of Agents of SHIELD. But “it’s boring, but not the most boring thing ever” is hardly glowing praise.

One big problem with the plot of Iron Fist is that it wanted to be more grounded and gritty, like the other shows, so the writers avoided jumping into crazy kung fu magic right away by starting with a subplot about Danny convincing his childhood friends of who he is and joining his father’s company as a 51% shareholder, then causing a bunch of trouble with his stupid naivete. Naivete is Danny’s core character trait, as Claire even points out in a later episode (yes, she’s in this too). We’ll go into that more in the characters section.

This plot construction means we spend a lot of the early episodes in corporate boardrooms and fancy corner offices with Danny’s childhood friends, Ward and Joy Meachum. Both are decently characterized, though Joy is a little inconsistent. But the early episodes spend so much time with them. By comparison, I just watched the first three episodes of Daredevil again; Foggy and Karen get about fifteen minutes out of two episodes, which is just the right amount for us to get to know them without distracting us from the actual story.

But saying “actual story” implies that there is an actual story, and Iron Fist doesn’t really have an actual story. It does have some actual plot elements, but those on their own would only fill up about four episodes, and they don’t have any kind of meaningful climax. Still, later episodes at least get us out of the goddamn boardroom and out on the streets watching kung fu battles. (This ultimately fails to satisfy, as we’ll see in the action sequences section, but it’s better than watching a bunch of people we don’t care about arguing about corporate governance.)

So, to sum up, pretty much everything that happens in the first four episodes could have been resolved in like five minutes, then we get some decent story, then some more weird, belabored stuff that probably could have been resolved in like twenty minutes, and then a very disappointing finale that really throws into focus how bad the action scenes are.

But the main problem with the plot isn’t how boring or slow it is. The fundamental problem is that we’ve seen this all before. We’ve seen stories about someone who comes back from the dead and has to prove their identity. We’ve seen stories about young, fresh, idealistic guys who come in to a stodgy old company and start turning the way they do things upside down. The show hits all these beats we’ve seen before, and does absolutely nothing new with them. Then it spreads these stale old plot elements that we’ve all seen before over multiple episodes of belabored drama until we all cry out “Enough, we’ve seen this before!” It has the same problem with a lot of the magical kung fu material, but that at least is inherently exciting, unlike uninspired boardroom drama.

The characters

—are really annoying and inconsistent. I’m not one of those people who usually gets angry at fictional characters for doing something stupid or overlooking an obvious solution to their problems, but even I was wincing and going “Geez, Danny, why the hell did you do that?” more times than I’d prefer.

Danny is stupid. There’s no other word for it; he’s just not very smart. I mostly gave him a pass for this because I know he’s being set up as a boyish, naive character to contrast with the three dark, moody, gritty, street-smart loners that will make up the rest of the Defenders. But there were times when his actions defied sense, like when he breaks into Joy’s apartment in Episode 1.

Colleen Wing is probably the most interesting character, but they dropped a fascinating thread from the early episodes, where Danny finds out she’s been participating in underground cage fights and she admits she enjoys the feeling of being out of control and showing off her true skill. Instead, she becomes a sidekick and later girlfriend/sidekick. While her relationship with Danny wasn’t the worst relationship ever put on TV, it didn’t feel quite natural.

Ward Meachum is portrayed as a conniving asshole the entire series, only to have a sudden change of heart and become best friends with Danny towards the end. On the other hand, Joy Meachum was the one on Danny’s side, but she turns against him for poorly motivated reasons in the final episode. Her change of heart is better motivated than Ward’s, but there are still aspects to it that don’t make sense.

I liked seeing Jeri Hogarth, the lawyer from Jessica Jones played by Carrie-Anne Moss, get to show off her better side in this series. She was a very unpleasant person in Jessica Jones, but she was also at an extreme low point in her life, so seeing her be less ruthless in Iron Fist makes her seem more three-dimensional as a character.

I also liked seeing Claire Temple again. She was one of my favorite parts of Luke Cage, and we get a nice Easter egg when she reads a letter Luke wrote to her from prison. She isn’t as important and vital a part of the narrative here as she was in Luke Cage, though. Here she’s kind of another sidekick for Danny. The other annoying thing about her appearance, which is unfair and completely my own problem, is that she kept on dropping hints about all the other heroes she knows, but no one ever thought to try and ask them for help. Luke may be in prison, but Claire also knows Daredevil and Jessica Jones, yet when Danny runs off to fight his way through three deadly martial artists and rescue a girl from the evil bowels of The Hand’s base by himself, no one ever considers calling one of them for help.

The villains in Iron Fist are, if anything, even worse than Luke Cage. Harold Meachum, Ward and Joy’s father, is revealed as the main villain in a shocking twist that was also totally obvious ever since Episode 4. The fight with him in Episode 13 is...ah, I’ll talk about it in the action scenes section, but I think the best word for it is “pathetic”. There’s also Bakuto, who is sort of a less interesting ninja version of Diamondback with a weird voice. And Madame Gao is still going around making trouble. She’s the closest thing to a decent villain we get in Iron Fist, but later in the show she just kind of gives up and lets Danny fight with Bakuto and Harold while watching from the sidelines.

By the way, if there’s one thing that worries me about The Defenders, it’s the villain. Luke Cage and Iron Fist have both had trouble developing convincing villains, and The Hand, who are apparently going to be in play for The Defenders, weren’t amazing villains in Daredevil Season 2 either; they just got by because we had Elektra and The Punisher to distract us, so all we needed was a big army of disposable ninjas for them to plow through. It’s possible that The Defenders will survive with a disappointing villain on the strength of having all four heroes get together, the same way The Avengers and Age of Ultron did. (Yes, I don’t consider Loki a particularly engaging villain. I guess he’s more interesting compared to the villains in other Marvel movies, but that’s not saying much.) But Daredevil Season 1 and Jessica Jones were such strong stories largely because of their villains, and I attribute at least part of the weakness of Iron Fist and the later parts of Luke Cage to the lack of such a villain. I hope The Defenders can aspire higher.

The action sequences

—are not very good.

After I watched the series, I saw some news items indicating that Finn Jones, the actor who plays Danny (and also Ser Loras Tyrell, the gay knight in Game of Thrones) only had about three weeks to get in shape and learn martial arts before filming started, and he would get about fifteen minutes to practice a fight before they started filming. It shows. It really shows.

Sometimes the fights are still pretty good. There was a fight scene in the back of a truck in Episode 5 that was filmed in short, jerky, close-in shots so you couldn’t tell how slow and clumsy the actors actually were. Colleen’s two cage matches in the early episodes are at least competently performed and manage to evoke a genuine sort of tension at times. (Although I find it funny how quick the big, tough guy in the first fight was to jump into the ring with her after all the hooting and booing that the audience was up to. Dude, you’re walking into a lose-lose situation. If you win, you’re a hulking six-foot man who just beat up a five-foot-tall woman. Gee, what a man. And if you lose, you’re a hulking six-foot man who just got beat up by a five-foot-tall woman. Ha, what a loser!) The final battle with Bakuto in the rain is also decent.

Most of the fights, however, are closer to something that would maybe be passable as a dance routine on America’s Got Talent. They would probably get an enthusiastic pass from two of the judges and maybe a weak pass from a third. In Episode 6 we get a three-fight tournament style battle that should have been awesome, but the fights themselves were so underwhelming that it was hard to enjoy. All I could keep thinking of was the last part of the Kyouto story in Rurouni Kenshin, when Shishio invites the heroes to a similar tournament against his three champions, and how much better it was in every way. The second fight wasn’t even a real fight; it was a weird, out of place, clumsy attempt at seduction followed by a woman sticking poisoned acupuncture needles in Danny.

Colleen carried a katana everywhere, but she seemed oddly reluctant to actually cut anyone with it, and it bugged the shit out of me. It reminded me of watching cartoons in the 90’s, when characters would have guns or swords, but they couldn’t actually use them. Gargoyles was one of my favorite shows, but it always bugged the hell out of me that Elisa could never fire her gun and Hudson could never actually use his sword to cut up anyone. Elisa’s gun would always get knocked out of her hands or crushed, and Hudson would seem to forget he even had a sword unless there was a rope he could cut to make something fall from the roof onto his enemies. (Until the battle droids came out; then it was all slicing and stabbing.) Colleen practices the same style of swordsmanship; she mostly just attacks the other person’s weapon and misses perfectly good chances to stab dangerous, gun-wielding enemies, instead choosing to laboriously fight them off with her fists. I understand that they didn’t want Danny or Colleen to kill anyone, but Daredevil never really kills anyone either, yet he is constantly breaking arms and occasionally throws Russian gangsters off of roofs, because that’s what you have to do when you’re in a realistic universe fighting dangerous gun-wielding gangsters with just your fists and a stick. Colleen is a darker character than Danny, and she carries a goddamned katana, so it would have been in-character for her to cut off some limbs, especially in the final battle when she’s fighting a bunch of thugs with guns.

Speaking of the final battle...yeah, it’s bad. Danny and Colleen clumsily fight their way up to the top floor of Rand Enterprises to take on Harold Meachum. Once the guns come out, the only reason they aren’t shot to pieces immediately is that all of Harold’s guards graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship, so even Colleen, who has no superpowers whatsoever, can run through a hail of bullets without being hit, then beat up five guys one-handed. (She does it one-handed because the other hand is holding the sword that she’s not using.) It ends with a one-on-one rooftop fight between Danny and Harold, which is, as I stated above, pathetic. Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist, the defender of K’un-Lun, the first white guy ever to overcome the dragon and gain the power of the Iron Fist, who has spent the entire series telling us at every opportunity that he is, in fact, the Iron Fist, fights one-on-one on equal footing with a company CEO in late middle age who drinks lots of veggie juice. Actually, he gets beaten by a company CEO in late middle age who drinks lots of veggie juice. He isn’t killed only because Ward comes to the roof and shoots Harold.

If Jet Li couldn’t beat an old white guy who drinks juice, I’d call bullshit. Finn Jones is no Jet Li, but his character is supposed to be. And he can’t do it. Not even with supernatural powers. This takes the half-baked, awkward battles of the rest of the show to a whole new level of stupidity.

The social themes

—are not there. There aren’t any. There are a few weak attempts at doing corporate responsibility as a theme, but it’s poorly developed and has no real payoff or conclusion.

Not all good stories have social themes. Breaking Bad has no overt social theme, but it’s a well-made show with a great story and interesting characters, and many critics agreed. I also believe in the power of implicit social themes, ones that you only get by analyzing the context of a story. The Spider-Gwen comics, for instance, are almost indistinguishable in story content from the early Amazing Spider-Man, just transplanted to 2015. But just by doing that, they’re implicitly validating the idea that female superheroes are just as worthy of attention as male superheroes, that they can have all the same admirable qualities and all the same flaws and foibles. I think it’s worthwhile to do stories like that alongside stories like Jessica Jones that hinge more directly on the main character being a woman. Implicit social statements often don’t seem noteworthy twenty years later. No one who watches Star Trek nowadays finds it remarkable that Uhura works on the bridge with all the white men. But it was an important message for people at that time that a black woman could be a professional in a trusted position alongside the white men.

So it’s not like Iron Fist needed to have social themes. Not having them does make it more boring, but it doesn’t irreparably damage the show in my eyes. A lot of critics did castigate the show for its lack of social themes, but I think that came less from an overriding belief that every show needs to have social themes, and more as an easy symbol for the fact that this show offers absolutely nothing new from a storytelling or character perspective. It’s a story about a dumb, naive, heroic, powerful white guy with a simplistic sense of morality fighting against evil ninjas and scheming corporate leaders. It’s Monkey D. Luffy starring in Batman Begins.

Apparently there was a whitewashing controversy over this show. There seems to be a whitewashing controversy over everything nowadays. Sometimes it has merit; nothing against Tilda Swinton, but the reasons given for casting her as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange were, let’s say, reasons that I had a problem with. It doesn’t bother me that they cast Danny Rand white; Danny Rand in the comics was white, and frankly, he’s such a doofus in this show that I’m glad he’s not Asian American. As a quasi Asian American, I don’t want him as the representative of my people in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Colleen Wing in the comics is, as far as I can tell, half white and half Japanese, so casting half white and half Singaporean Chinese Jessica Henwick was a pretty good call. Bakuto’s casting does bother me a bit, though. He’s a ninja with a Japanese-sounding name, but he’s played by Puerto Rican Ramón Rodríguez. If he gave a good performance, it might not bother me, but he doesn’t; he’s a stereotypical villain with cheesy monologues delivered in a weirdly effete voice that’s half 80’s cartoon and half Roger Moore-era Bond villain. Some of this is obviously the writing and direction’s fault, but Rodríguez does nothing to make it better. Meanwhile, two much more menacing villains played by Asian actors, Drunken Fist Guy and Room Full of Weapons Guy, don’t even have names. (Room Full of Weapons Guy first appears in a karaoke room full of people he massacred, which is by far the most competent evil thing anyone does in this show.) Iron Fist’s buddy Davos, apparently a native of the Chinese-themed K’un-Lun, is named after a Swiss city and played by Sacha Dhawan, an actor born in England to Indian Hindu parents. Ethnically, Dhawan was also a somewhat odd choice, but unlike Rodríguez, he does give a good performance, so it doesn’t bother me.

Conclusion

I was pretty hard on Iron Fist in this review, but it’s honestly not completely terrible, more incessantly mediocre. When the plot isn’t being boring, it’s decent at building anticipation, but this anticipation is usually let down by lukewarm plot twists and the terrible action scenes. The characters aren’t badly written and they’re mostly competently acted (except for Bakuto), but there’s nothing new about them. There are no characters like Wilson Fisk, like Jessica Jones, like Kilgrave, like Misty Knight, who completely take over the screen and keep on surprising you with how they develop. Colleen is definitely the most interesting, and she’s the closest to being something different, but none of the interesting parts of her character ever go anywhere: her struggles with money evaporate when Danny buys her building; her exasperated, “don’t get me involved” attitude disappears as soon as Danny buys her a fancy dinner and asks her to help scope out The Hand’s drug shipment; her lust for combat gets forgotten and abandoned around the same time; and her desire to help out the disadvantaged kids in her neighborhood ends up feeding soldiers to The Hand, but she never takes a moment to regret this, instead jumping to make up with Danny and get involved in his pathetic final battle against an old guy who makes juice.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. Good things about Iron Fist. Right. Well, there aren’t many (really any), but there also aren’t any flagrantly terrible things about it. It’s a solid 2.5 out of 5: bland, artistically inoffensive, its major crime infliction of boredom. It only makes the leap to really terrible if you get riled up over its lack of social themes or the whitewashing stuff, but as I said, I don’t really consider Iron Fist whitewashed because Danny Rand was white in the comics, and although they could have reasonably changed him to Asian American, I’m not sorry they didn’t because then the dumbest, blandest hero in the Defenders would also be the Asian one, which does about as much for representation as Challenge of the Superfriends did by adding Apache Chief and Black Vulcan.

The mediocrity of Iron Fist is only noteworthy because it comes on the heels of three amazing shows that I, honestly, enjoy a lot more than the MCU films. Iron Fist feels like one of the films trying to be one of the Netflix shows. It doesn’t take any chances with its story or characters, like the films, which mostly rely on a hero with a big personality surrounded by the same set of standard supporting characters proceeding through one of a few different simple plotlines. But it throws away the things that the films focus on instead—the colors, the quips, the fun, the incredible action scenes, the spectacle—and treats its bland characters and story as if they’re as engaging and challenging as the other Netflix shows’. The previous three shows, despite their imperfections, were incredible, and Iron Fist didn’t live up to any of them on any count. It’s hard not to be disappointed by that.

It’s also unfortunate that Iron Fist might turn out to be required viewing to follow The Defenders when it comes out. Not many plot details have been released about The Defenders, but what has come out suggests that it’ll involve the big hole in the ground that The Hand was digging in Daredevil Season 2, which means The Hand will be the villains, which means things we learn about them in Iron Fist might come into play. Works that take place in a big shared universe have their pros and their cons, and this is one of the cons: sometimes you have to keep up on the mediocre stuff to be able to follow what’s going on in the really good stuff. That’s really the only reason I could recommend that someone watch Iron Fist; it doesn’t gain anything interesting from being in the MCU, and there are better corporate dramas and better kung fu movies about there, so there’s no real reason to watch a show that’s half corporate drama, half kung fu movie, and not particularly good at either.