Iron Fist (2017)
I still think it's shit. It's hard to write a post like this "rebutting" previous positive reviews of the show, as I don't want to just be saying "I disagree" a lot. But at the same time, the enormous, fatal flaws with this are simply
obvious to me, to the degree that I'm astonished it's gotten passes from people here. This was obviously a rush job squeezed out in less than a year to fulfill Marvel's contract with Netflix, handled by people who had no real love of or even interest in the source material, and Marvel clearly knew it was a dud before they released it, as shown by the lack of any real promotion or marketing in the weeks leading up to its release, especially in comparison to the other shows.
The writing is awful across the board, including the dialogue, the characterization, and the plot. Like, the show tries to establish that Ward is a douchebag by showing him as a teenager angrily refusing to follow the rules of Monopoly and eventually upending the board because "Rules are for pussies." That is atrocious writing. Same with a scene where Danny's hanging out in Central Park, and a random fucking hobo approaches him to offer to lend him a phone he can use to look up people. That is hackery as straight-up as it comes. Nobody who wrote that shit down and called it acceptable has any business working as a screenwriter. Now, both of those scenes were in the pilot, and I've heard a lot of defenses that the show gets better as it goes on. That's true enough, because the first three episodes are padding. You could skip them easily and miss nothing of value (insert joke about the overall show's value here) as the story doesn't really begin until the fourth episode. We know that this person who's struggling to prove his identity is really Danny Rand. He must be, because why else would this show, called
Iron Fist, be following his perspective? So it's basically just three hours of dead air.
It does get better once the oh-so-narratively-rich issue of "Can Danny prove his identity?" is settled, but even then, the show has problems. One is how it tries to handle the subject of K'un-Lun and Danny's training. I feel like it should have taken one of two approaches here. One would be to really show off K'un Lun, build a cool set for it and everything, and show what Danny had to go through to become the Iron Fist. They could have relegated it to a single episode, like
Luke Cage, or shown it in chronological flashbacks every episode, like
Arrow. Alternatively, they could have downplayed what happened in K'un Lun. Danny returns to New York, eager to rejoin the world he knew in his childhood, avoid talking about where he's been or what he's been doing, until something happens that draws him back to that life. However, the show tries to go for a middle ground that doesn't work at all - they never show anything more than brief glimpses of K'un Lun, and try to compensate by having Danny constantly talking about it. He never fucking shuts up. When I was in K'un Lun this, back in K'un Lun that. Even if Finn Jones was a fantastic actor, this would be a bad idea. I'm hesitant to say this because of how clichéd it's become, but this is a textbook violation of the "show, don't tell" rule. It doesn't work to have a character just talk about how impactful this one thing was and have the audience just know what it was like.
On the notion of Danny himself, easily the worst character in the MCU. His personality frequently lurches from extreme to extreme, his behavior and knowledge of social norms have no consistency, and I have severe doubts about how intentional any of this was. It makes no sense that someone like him had the strength and discipline to become the Iron Fist (quibbles about him not finishing his training are just that, quibbles). I also don't like the portrayal of the Hand here, as I discussed with Snupes on IRC:
<Saddam> By the way, is it a thing in the comics that the Iron Fist can only be used occasionally and briefly, because of his chi being drained?
<Snupes> Yeah, but not to the show's extent
<Saddam> Lazy way to handicap the hero
<Saddam> Luke Cage did the same thing with the dumb Judas bullets element
<Snupes> Yeah
<Snupes> I mean, if Danny could use the Fist nonstop the show would be pretty short
<Snupes> But the way they made it like "well i can punch once per century
" was pretty dumg
<Saddam> Not if the show was smart about it and gave him situations that appropriately challenged his power level
<Snupes> Sure but he's also going to be teaming up with a blind kung-fu man
<Snupes> If it was superhuman strength + superhuman strength and invulnerability + super superhuman strength + blind guy who is pretty good at fighting, Daredevil would be sad
<Saddam> That's the same logic people use to argue that Hawkeye and Black Widow are useless to the Avengers
<Snupes> I mean
<Snupes> Black Widow is a bit different because she's got super agility and super spy training
<Snupes> Hawkeye has magical arrows that will do literally anything
<Snupes> Daredevil is hard to catch off-guard and can beat up normal people and most ninjas
<Saddam> Okay, I remembered something I wanted to baw about with Ronald Fisting
<Saddam> The show's portrayal of Madame Gao and the Hand contradicts much of what was in Daredevil, and is overall a very reductive treatment
<Saddam> The people behind the show just looked at Gao and figured that she was an evil Asian character, and therefore must have been in the Hand
<Saddam> There's no way in hell she was meant to be part of it when Daredevil was being made
<Saddam> Iron Fist does have plenty of Asian villains that aren't part of the Hand, right?
<Saddam> And the notion of there being multiple different factions of the Hand manages the difficult feat of simultaneously being overly-convoluted while also being overly-simplistic and reductive
<Saddam> And it hurt me to see a cool character like Gao being forced to utter the show's inane dialogue
<Snupes> I'm pretty sure there are a few non-Hand Asian villains, yeah
<Saddam> The crazy ninjas from Daredevil have absolutely nothing in common with these mystical drug dealers
Finally, to revisit the subject of the action scenes - they're still really bad, and the fact that Jones doesn't know martial arts is only part of it. These directors don't understand how to make action good. There's very rarely any style or creativity with the fights. The combatants don't move in any interesting ways, they don't fight in any interesting ways - it's just standard, generic, hit-them-until-they-fall-down shit. The physics of the fights are often off, as we see characters tanking through heavy blows and being staggered backwards or knocked down by light taps, and when the camera isn't constantly cutting to disguise the lack of solid choreography, it's filming the action in the most flat, unengaged way possible. This is a show about a magical kung fu master. It should have kickass fight scenes, not this lazy cribbing from
Taken. I'll go further. Fucking
Arrow has better fight scenes than this, at least in the first two seasons. Come to think of it, the first two seasons of
Arrow are better than this show in pretty much every way.
I'm sad to say that this show being so underwhelming has hurt my excitement for
The Defenders. It's like future filmmakers trying to improve the DCEU after Zack Snyder pissed all over everything with BvS. You can't build a stable house on a rotten foundation. I don't like Danny, and I don't want to see more of him. I suppose it's possible that there might be some character development for him there, but I doubt that the people behind that show would be willing to call out
this show for having such an odious, entitled douchebag as its supposed hero. Oh, and Snupes, I wouldn't get my hopes up about Danny having his costume for
Defenders. They've already released one teaser showing him very prominently without any disguise, even as Matt is making an effort to wear a mask. Which makes sense. You can't un-introduce Danny. He's already been established as someone who has no interest in wearing a special outfit or hiding his identity at all, and undoubtedly dozens of people already know what he can do.