Iron Fist (Netflix–2017)

Naïve and kindly, but also bratty, Danny Rand (Finn Jones) returns to New York after having been declared dead years ago in a plane crash. He’d been rescued by monks and trained to be a warrior, eventually picking up the magical power of the “Iron Fist.” He is now the defender of the monetary from The Hand, but he left because he felt unsatisfied. His father’s multi-billion dollar company is now run by Joy Meachum (Jessica Stroup), a childhood friend, and Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey), a childhood bully who hasn’t improved. Unknown to most, their father, Harold Meachum (David Wenham), who died and was resurrected by The Hand, is pulling the corporate strings behind the scenes. While Danny slow—oh, so slowly—proves who he is, he gets involved with martial arts instructor Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) who has her own secrets; this allows for Danny to spout off all kinds of Asian phrases to the Asian girl, making Danny look like douche bag of the year—although apparently we aren’t supposed to think that.

Remember the Phantom Menace? Remember how you asked for a new Star Wars movie that would emphasize trade negotiations? You don’t remember that? Yeah, that’s because it never happened. How about when you asked for a comic book martial arts film that would really focus on corporate legal arguments? Didn’t ask for that either? No one did.

So, we bring the MCU not down to street level, but to the most boring penthouse you can imagine. There’s legal wrangling as we watch Danny Rand ineffectually argue that he is the supposedly dead son of a billionaire. Like the other Netflix shows, Iron Fist forgets that it isn’t interesting for us to be ahead of the characters. We know the lead character is Danny, so waiting for everyone else to get up to speed just uses up time. That time could have been spent working out who these characters are and what makes them tick. But Iron Fists prefers the simple approach. How do we know that corporate asshole is an asshole? Show him cheating at Monopoly as a kid and yelling that “rules are for pussies.” This is not a nuanced show.

While Iron Fist is supposedly of a more adult nature then average programming, watching it felt like watching a kid’s show. Danny is an emotionally unstable ten year old. Sure, spending years in a monastery could leave him naïve, but he’s a spoiled child. And everyone interacts like children. Ward functions purely as a bully kid. Claire Temple, now in every show, gives us first grade morality (killing is bad!). Gee, thanks. Characters get very upset if they aren’t getting enough attention. The whole show would make sense if these were a group of children just reaching puberty. A substantial part of the back end of the series is about Danny throwing a tantrum. We’re supposed to take it as a combination of PTSD and moral evaluation, but it’s just a tantrum.

Iron Fist has the slowest start of any of the series. The first eight episodes crawl, with little of interest happening. Things pick up in episode 9 (far too late), but it then stumbles again before coming to a remarkably unsatisfying conclusion (Danny is only alive because henchmen seem to not shoot their guns sometimes in the middle of a fight…)

The villains could have elevated things, but they do not live up to their potential. The undying Harold Meachum ends up doing the same sort of corporate bad guy things we’ve seen in dozens of non-superhero films. And the mystery villain that pops up late could have been interesting if it wasn’t clear immediately that he was a villain. I don’t know why “smarmy” was the choice they made. He could have been multifaceted. But nope.

So this time, we have all the expected problems, but they are worse. Iron Fist is slow. The editing is primitive. The plot could fill 6 episodes, not 13. There are speeches and the same subjects keep getting brought up. It is the worst of the shows, so it needed theme to save it like Luke Cage and Jessica Jones. But it doesn’t get it. Instead, theme drags it down. First, its themes are confused. The whole “killing is bad” and “I must get past my anger” puts us squarely back in children’s programming. It dips a finger into currant American culture with the problems of massive corporations and then flops about like a fish. The series takes the stance that big corporations can be mean (edgy there…), but then groups anyone who wants to change the system into The Hand, labeling them as either evil or fools. What does that leave? The big message: Corporations are OK as long as good people run them, even if the good people are stupid (and yeah, Danny is stupid). Gosh, I wonder why no one ever thought of having good people run corporations.

Which brings me to the missing theme. The character of Iron Fist was created to profit from the popularity of Hong Kong martial arts films. But in the early ‘70s, Marvel was far happier to sell another White character then bring in an Asian one as they should have. So they race-swapped an Asian, giving us a White savior. He’s a White kid, but dumped into the mysterious Orient and their inscrutable ways, he becomes better then all the people who live there. Naturally he’s better. He’s White. He tosses around pop culture Asian saying and is the great White martial arts master. This is an old trope, that should have been dumped years ago.

So Marvel had a choice. They could propagate a racist trope from the ‘70s, that’s also a cliché that makes the character less interesting, or they could fix their forty year old mistake. They chose the former. They went with the cliché giving us something duller than it should be, and racist.

Being a racist cliché did not sink Iron Fist. It was already sunk from its plot and editing and childish characters. But, if they’d made the right decision, and made Danny an Asian or an Asian-American (probably the best choice), then we’d have something new for cinematic superheroes. Then we’d have a theme with something to say. And maybe that would have been enough to save the show (as happened to some extent with Luke Cage and Jessica Jones). Doctor Strange suffers from the same racist cliché (though to a much lesser extent), but it had enough else going for it that it didn’t need to be saved. It’s fun, if a touch uncomfortable. Iron Fist has very little going for it. So theme was its one chance, and a racial positive theme dealing with Asian-Americans would have been a game changer.

Instead, Iron Fist has to stand on some other qualities, and it has none that are strong enough to hold it up.