So….better than late than never I guess.
Yes, I know I’m notoriously slow with watching and reviewing these Marvel Netflix shows,
but sorry, I have school and something of a social life, I can’t binge 13 hours in
one weekend.
But, now that I’ve finally watched all of Marvel’s Iron Fist, it’s time to talk
about it.
*clip* So this is actually a really interesting review,
because there’s been a big controversy around this show.
Really, this is the first MCU property to just get terrible reviews.
Like, some movies and shows in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been given, ehhh,
mediocre reviews, but this thing was just destroyed on arrival.
And do I think that’s justified?
Ummm kind of, not entirely.
Maybe I just went into this show with lowered expectations, actually that’s not a maybe,
I definitely went into this show with lowered expectations, but I didn’t hate this.
There’s some stuff here that is truly awful, a lot of stuff that’s just kind of eh, and
some stuff that I thought, that’s actually pretty cool.
Also before we dive into this, since it’s been out for a while, I’m talking about
this show with full spoilers.
You’ve been warned.
Firstly, the cast here is….a mixed bag.
Finn Jones as Danny Rand...ok, let’s try to talk about this without enraging one side
of this whole controversy.
I’m not gonna talk about that whole white-washing debacle just because every review I go to,
no matter what the reviewer says about it, all the comments are just about that and it’s
just a giant mess, so I’ll leave other people to debate if Danny Rand should’ve been Asian.
I don’t think it’s really for me to say.
Just as far as the performance goes, I didn’t think he was all that great.
There were moments where I thought, hey ok, this performance is kind of likeable and believable.
And then there were moments were it kind of felt like watching a high school student putting
on a Shakespeare play.
Some of that could also have been bad writing for this character, because a few times he
acted frustratingly childish, but the performance really was kind of on and off for me, and
that doesn’t really help when that performance is what’s supposed to really carry the whole
show.
Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing I really liked, Rosario Dawson is really good in these shows
as usual.
And then there were the Meachum's.
I thought David Wenham was….good as Harold, pretty much the main villain, he kind of chewed
up the scenery a lot of the time and sometimes it got a bit too much for me at least, but
I thought he was alright.
As far as Joy, I thought she was pretty solid most of the time, and for the Donald Trump
Jr lookalike Ward, at first I really didn’t like him.
Like I thought the character was boring and frustrating to watch and the performance was
kind of wooden, but as the show progressed he got way better and might’ve actually
become my favorite part of the show.
As it went along, both his character got so much more compelling and weirdly enough I
felt like the acting got a lot better too.
So, props to Tom Pelphrey for this one.
Now, as previously mentioned, this show is very divisive.
It’s gotten really bad reviews from critics, but I’ve heard from a lot of people, mainly
a lot of my subscribers, that they ended up actually quite enjoying it.
So I do wanna say, those first early reviews that kind of came as a huge shock were from
critics who’d only watched the first 6 episodes.
And if you’d only watched those, I can understand why you’d give it a scathing review, because,
as we’ll get into a bit later, the show improves quite dramatically after the first
few episodes.
That is not to say though that the show doesn't have any problems after that, because it definitely
does.
But I’m just saying after about episode 4 I thought the show got considerably more
enjoyable.
From here on out in this review, I feel like I can only divide this into the stuff I liked
and the stuff I didn’t.
So, let’s start positive.
What did I like.
There are some really great visual effects here.
The actual Iron Fist effect itself looks awesome, and whenever he punches something or something
ricochetes off of it it looks cool and pretty believable.
The cinematography, like the other Netflix shows, for the most part is really good.
Weirdly enough I actually really liked the music, that stood out to me as one of the
best parts of this.
The way this connects to the other Marvel properties is cool, I liked seeing Hogarth
pop up again, Madame Gao and the Hand and tying this all to Daredevil was cool, seeing
Luke Cage is writing to Claire from prison was a nice touch.
Honestly I really enjoyed that aspect probably just because I’m so unbelievably excited
for Defenders.
I just wanna put this out there, seeing these four heroes team up has me like almost Avengers
levels excited, I’m so hyped.
Some of the action here was awesome….key word some, we’ll get to that later.
I also actually kinda believed the chemistry between Danny and Colleen despite some of
their dialogue being not great, and while nearly all of the characters started off very
unlikeable at the start of the show, nearly all of them progressively got more likeable
as the show went along.
And again, that’s the best I can say for this.
It gets better as it goes, and then kind of falls back into not so greatness by the last
few episodes.
And now, let’s talk about what I didn’t like here.
Ok, firstly….those first few episodes.
Episodes 1 to about 3 or 4 are bad in my opinion.
Like, kind of really bad.
I thought most of the characters made really stupid illogical decisions, there was some
really clunky action, some exposition that wasn’t very smooth, too many flashbacks,
weird plot devices and conveniences, bad writing which lead to some pretty cringey scenes,
and really bad pacing that made them surprisingly quite boring.
I actually checked the running time of the episodes to see how much more was left a lot
in those first few episodes, which I normally don’t really find myself doing.
There’s a lot of time spent on Rand Enterprises and all the company logistics that go on behind
that which got really really repetitive after just two or three episodes.
There are a lot of board meetings and then Danny doing something that messes up the company
and then Ward getting angry and then Danny doing more stuff that messes up the company
and then Ward getting angry and so on and so on.
Legit by the third episode I was getting kind of tired of this already.
These first episodes are also really frustrating to watch, because like I said, characters
make decisions that are obviously just there for padding out the runtime.
There are so many other ways Danny could’ve gone about this entire process, and I know
people will say well he was in a monastery for 15 years, he doesn’t know how this stuff
works.
And that’s fine, have him do that at first, but when he keeps making the same stupid contrived
decisions over and over and over again, it gets really annoying.
The show also doesn’t have a ton of humor, and when it does, some of it kind of falls
flat.
A lot of the writing here isn’t great, it’s flat out bad at a few times, the dialogue
between characters can seem unnatural at points, or sometimes when Danny is talking about some
mystical something or other it kinda seems like he doesn’t really know what he’s
talking about and is just reading from a script, again, maybe that comes down to the performance.
And while yes, the show does improve, these problems do still crop up throughout the season,
especially towards the end.
Also, while I said some of the action is good, some of this action is truly awful.
Some of this isn’t very well choreographed, which is very surprising for a Marvel Netflix
show, like the Daredevil choreography stuff is genuinely amazing, while some of this is
just not well planned at all.
Apparently for some of these, Finn Jones was given about 15 minutes before a fight scene
to prepare the choreography, and it does show sometimes.
Some of it is also really badly filmed and horribly edited, like sometimes there are
so many cuts in a fight scene it gets dizzying and confusing and sometimes there are continuity
inconsistencies and yeah….some of this is just really really poorly pulled off, which
I think was the most surprising part of this for me.
If there was one thing I was expecting this show to absolutely nail, it was the fight
scenes.
This show also does something that shows and movies will sometimes do that kind of annoys
me, and that’s where they talk about stuff a lot and then never show it.
I get it, ok, shows have budgets, it’d cost a lot to make a giant CGI dragon and a giant
CGI city full of monks, but the way they handled it here just felt especially cheap, like they
keep talking over and over again about K’un Lun and this dragon he fought, and we keep
getting these other flashbacks of hawks on mountains and child beating sessions, and
then when it’s finally time for the dragon, it’s all just people saying, oh man, that
was a big dragon you fought!
Oh boy, that was onnnne scary dragon.
And you see some red eyes, that’s it.
Again, I get why it is what it is, but it did feel kind of like a cop out.
Also, I wanna say, episode 12 was actually a pretty good episode, and it also really
felt like it had wrapped up the season.
Like there were some loose ends, but it left it open for another season and it really felt
like a conclusion.
Which made the actual final episode feel a little more like a drag and tacked on and
slightly anticlimactic, which is the opposite of what you want with a show like this.
In conclusion, Iron Fist for me was very hit or miss.
There were some very cool ideas and moments, some great performances, and the show does
pick up a bit after the first few episodes.
But those first few episodes are really messy, and a lot of the problems they have continue
throughout the season.
Is it 17% on Rotten Tomatoes bad, no.
I definitely would say that's too low.
I’m gonna give Iron Fist season 1 a 5.8/10.
So those were my thoughts on Iron Fist.
What did you think of this?
Let me know all of your thoughts down below in the comments.
While you’re at it be sure to like this video, check out my Instagram and Twitter
@bhl_hudson, and subscribe for more videos like the one you just watched.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see ya next time.