Iron Fist Season 1: Nobody Wanted This

There's a lot of accusations thrown my way about unnecessary hate on Marvel and I'm okay with that. I'm going to get some today and that's cool. I've never actually said a bad thing about the Netflix shows on Marvel but, that's about to change. See, I finally finished Iron Fist and there's not a lot of nice things I can say about it. I even broke it up into categories so I can spread my hate evenly.

Characters: Most of Them Are Bad

I know some people wanted to have an Asian version of Danny Rand and I'm here to tell you it would have done absolutely nothing to fix how boring Danny is. Danny is literally a rich white guy who likes rap music and punching stuff. He also just needs to throw himself into every situation hoping for an adrenaline rush. In the comics Danny is this hilarious guy with a social conscience and his love of hip hop makes sense because of his relationship with Luke Cage and Misty Knight, none of that's explained here. So it's weird for a guy who has been gone for 15 years to suddenly come home and know Vince Staples or Run The Jewels and he doesn't tell a single joke. He's a rich guy doing it because he can.

Colleen Wing is probably the best character on the show and way more interesting than what's going on with Danny and the Meechums. Her introduction into underground fight clubs and struggling dojo is just way more interesting. Additionally she's friends with Claire Temple and that's awesome. The Meechums are just kind of weird with the exception of Ward. They're supposed to be villains and instead they just come off as creepy like Randall from Recess. As for Ward, he's interesting because what the fuck is going on with that guy? They could have made everyone else more interesting if they took a little from Ward and gave it to them. He'd still be interesting too.

Fights: Just go watch Arrow 

Boy, let me tell you about these damn fights. Colleen's fights were great and it's obvious that Jessica Henwick practiced before hand. But, Finn Jones and Danny Rand can pick up a gun or something because those fights were trash. In the very first scene Danny takes on some security guards. He lightly taps them and you can see them look for a spot to lay down and play sleep. There's one point where he hits a guard and he doesn't know if he should fall or not so he pretends to trip on a pile of other guards and play sleep.

I'm not saying Arrow is the pinnacle of fights but they never do this bullshit. Yeah I said it, it's bullshit. Danny is supposed to be one of the best fighters in the entire Marvel Universe and he's over here playing freeze tag with the punches. The biggest issue is they try to use lighting and editing cuts to make the fights intense but it doesn't help. They just look worse. Here's a 36 second fight with 56 different cuts. That's 1.5 cuts per second.

What the fuck was that? Did someone have a seizure in the editing room? I don't know how they're passing this off as a martial arts show for the fans. They wanted to stick to their guns and keep Danny as a white guy but they could have at least hired a white guy who does martial arts or has more than 4 emotions.

Story: This Isn't Iron Fist. It's Green Arrow (The TV Show)

Oliver Queen was stranded on an island and learned to use a bow to help him survive. He traveled around the world on stolen identities before returning home to purge his company and city of corruption. Danny Rand was stranded in the mountains and accepted into one of the heavenly cities were he was raised by the king who had previously adopted Danny's father. Eventually Danny was given the opportunity to punch a dragon in the mouth to earn the title of Iron Fist. That doesn't happen, he just follows the first season of Arrow without the earthquakes.

Music

This one is just a pet peeve. Danny didn't even like hip hop until he met Luke Cage and Misty Knight but the soundtrack is full of Vince Staples, Run The Jewels and others. So Danny just disappears off the face of the Earth for 15 years only to come back and be all caught up on hip hop? Nas said "My album done niggas wait and see," months ago Danny. Since you can see the future of music there when is it dropping. I need to know if he ever drops it, what's the best track?
 
General Nonsense:

This show is just horrible, who the fuck did they make it for? Did they make it for comic book fans? Because comic book fans would have liked to see Danny punch a dragon in the face and get super powers then put on a costume and run around the city beating up people, but that just didn't happen. Instead he fought corporate corruption. What about people who like martial arts films and TV shows? Well it wasn't for them based on those super duper trash fights so they weren't gonna keep watching. What about people who like shows revolving around corporate America. Well they were probably all for this, until ninjas started popping up and people were being revived from the dead. Yeah who is this show for? The magical center spot of the venn diagram?

There's this weird moment in the park when Colleen is hanging up posters for her martial arts dojo and gives homeless Danny a dollar. He gives it back to her then starts speaking Mandarin Chinese to her. It's at this point she explains that she's Japanese. There's no apology or anything. He just says "oh." Then with the exception of Colleen all the Asian people in the show are villains. Yeah, we get it, you didn't want to do an Asian Iron Fist and originally Iron Fist went around challenging Asian street gangs to duels. But, that was 1974 and it's 2017 now so that's kind of fucked up that you wanted to keep that part of the comics history but not the dragon.

This show also takes too long to get to the point. We get it, Netflix likes to play the long game with their shows and pull out 13 episodes. But, they could have condensed a lot of these. Did we need 3 episodes of homeless Danny trying to prove he was Danny before anyone did anything with it? No, we could have just done one episode and moved on. Did we really need a whole episode of Danny getting to know his new job? Not at all, but we got it.

This is by far the worst show to come from the partnering of Marvel and Netflix. If they had dropped this show first I would have skipped all the others. It had to be dropped just so people would know who Iron Fist was before The Defenders. Also, Daredevil is going to look like a real asshole now because of the Defenders roster, Daredevil and Iron Fist are the only ones who wear costumes. It was gonna be 50/50 in the costume split. But, now it's not because they wanted to ground a character who punched a dragon in the face. They could have punched a dragon in the face with this show, instead they made us all feel like children who had been grounded when watching it.

You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He also plays classic arcade games on The Cabinet. You can also check out his playthrough of Sleeping Dogs or Skyrim

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