Not everything made by Marvel can be great. Iron Fist is a show that has serious problems in just trying to find a point. It is incredibly hard to enjoy Iron Fist. Most of the series is spent actively trying to prevent the audience from caring about anything that’s going on.
For grounding first, Danny Rand was 15 when his billionaire parent’s plane crashed in the Himalayas. They died, he didn’t. He was rescued by mystical warrior monks from the hidden realm of Kun-Lun. They took him back, and trained him to live and fight. He trained for many years, undergoing any trials, culminating in putting his fist into the beating heart of an undying dragon. This granted him the role of The Immortal Iron Fist, who is supposed to defend Kun-Lun from the ancient evil of The Hand. (You may remember them as the evil ninjas in Daredevil).
Now older and trained, Danny Rand returns to New York, where he seeks to take back his family’s name and company.
When he returns, he must contend with being legally dead as well as having to deal with his childhood friends running the company that bears his name.
There, he has to come to terms with the corporate espionage of the billion dollar industry, whilst simultaneously trying to deal with ninja scheming from the Hand.
The show doesn’t make this blend work very well. The mystical and the corporate are trying to merge, with plotlines weaving in and out. In theory. Mostly,this involves just forgetting about story beats and characters until they’re needed again several episodes later. The problem is that there’s little to no consistency. Every couple of episodes, it feels like a different programme, with wildly different character motivations. Tonally, characters were all over the place.
This is all punctuated with Kung Fu fights. Not very good ones. The fight sequences in Daredevil and Luke Cage worked thematically. Daredevil got the shit kicked out of him at every turn, yet carried on because of the stubborn Catholic guilt in his soul. Luke Cage was literally invincible, so his fights were just a brutal beat down to his opponents as he goes on about his business.
Iron Fist does Kung Fu. And his opponents do Kung Fu. Sometimes he activates the Iron Fist and punches through walls or blocks weapons. That’s it. There’s not a whole lot else going on. One or two fights seem to suggest that they had a different choreographer, in particular anything involving Colleen Wing, but those are few and far between.
Part of this is down to costuming and design decisions. Danny Rand doesn’t wear the iron fist bandana or costume. His face is almost always visible and he’s got a very distinct haircut. As such, it’s incredibly hard to cut fight scenes together where you’re hiding his face. There’s scenes with of hoodies, or darkness, obscuring elements of the fights and allowing stunt performers to do good work. There are not enough of those scenes. Instead, mostly Iron Fist fight scenes consist of watching the main characters, who are supposed to be literal masters of martial arts, barely scrape through fights with random guards. Generally these all follow the same pattern. Iron fist disarms the attacker, takes a few punches, then rallies to take them down with a fancier move.
There’s no visually interesting stuff going on. And honestly, if they could find some way to give the fights some meaning, there would be no problem.
The best example of this is the “hallway fight” that’s seemingly required of every Netflix show now. Here, it’s rote and poorly set, with two brief moments of interesting design going on. One is a momentary decision of camera work, the other is a character beat. The staging isn’t even up there.
There’s nothing new to be learned about Danny Rand from his fight scenes. That’s partly because there’s nothing you can actually know about Danny Rand. He’s whatever the script needs at that moment.
He’s petulant. He’s constantly aggressive. He’s a child in the body of a man, unable to cope with the adult world around him. Initially this is supposedly about the trauma of his parents death, but after a while, this pretense is forgotten. It all just feels like there’s an attempt being made to teach some sort of eastern wisdom find your centre thing. Except, like everything in this series, Rand is presented so inconsistently in his reaction to whatever is going on. He’s funny. He’s clever. He’s inexperienced. He’s foolish. He’s brash, he’s humble, he’s all the things I listed above.
You can’t like the character because there isn’t one.
It can’t be denied, Danny Rand is the most unlikable and unpleasant protagonist of any Marvel Property.
Half the time they seem to want him to be a ninja Tony Stark, billionaire hero with Kung Fu skills. But Rand has none of that charisma.
Finn Jones has acting chops, but whether it’s the direction, the writing or even the stunt management, he cannot manage this role.
This is not to say that there is nothing redeemable about the programme. There are good points. Coleen Wing is an excellent character, portrayed with gusto by Jessica Henwick. Mostly acting against Finn Jones’ Danny Rand, she acquits herself comfortably. She even has some fun fight scenes.
Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple is incredible, as always. Her growth over the course of this series is a continuation of everything she’s done in each of the marvel series so far. When she finally gets some action sequences, I was cheering. Plus, she’s pulling heavy duty as the audience touchstone between this series and the rest of the defenders. It does feel a little difficult to reconcile that she doesn’t just call up Matt Murdock for support against the Hand though.
Claire represents the connection to the other Defenders series that function well. The other connections in terms of structure and series design are less favourable.
There’s a pivot around the third quarter of the series, much like Luke Cage and how the other Netflix series have worked. In this stories, certain things don’t quite work. In Iron Fist, this twist is incredibly dumb. It makes no sense from a story point of view and only serves to overcomplicate the narrative even further.
New Characters are introduced this late in the series with no context, then we get to understand their significance through flashback in the following episodes. Character motivations change, except not really, and new factions come to light.
In theory, this would be a good answer to the main complaint of the marvel Netflix series. They’ve had horrible pacing issues.
So realistically this would allow for a better balance. It doesn’t. Instead it just feels like a rushed introduction that comes out of nowhere. The show tries to introduce a sense of tension in trying to work out the motivation of different groups.
Except anyone can see the way that all of this is going to play out. It’s cliched, and obvious.
This show in particular has a reliance on the fact you’ll be watching everything all in one go. The lack of focus on a consistent plotline means that trying to return to the programme after a brief aside is difficult.
There was talk of recutting this series into a netflix film. It may have been better that way. A shorter running time would have given them a better chance of condensing the narrative.
As it is, this feels like they had to get this series out in order to set up plot points and characters for The Defenders mini series. It manages that at least.
Iron Fist is about a character straddling two worlds and failing to navigate either. It’s about trying to find focus and center. It just falls flat at every attempt. At best, it’s fine to watch, with a few good moments. At worst, it’s a confusing slog with a boring main character.