The Immortal Iron Fist Appears to Be Dead on Arrival
We already had our own reservations about Marvel’s Iron Fist, since fans had hoped the show would drop the source material’s white savior trope in the casting process, only to be disappointed. Then, there were the promo photos that looked like bad stock photography. There was Finn Jones briefly leaving Twitter after a confrontation on the platform. Now, reviewers have gotten their hands on the series’ first screeners, and it looks like we’re in for more disappointment when the show finally premieres.
And we’re likely to share that disappointment with many who have defended the show from criticism so far, because the main point seems to be that, any other issues aside, Iron Fist is boring. As Uproxx puts it, “The fact that both Danny (Finn Jones) and Colleen (Jessica Henwick) aren’t good at talking should be no sin for the genre. The problem is that Iron Fist is virtually all talk—most of it painfully dull—and the fighting is both brief and unconvincing. It’s easily the worst of the Netflix Marvel shows.”
There’s still a chance that it breaks the Marvel/Netflix show mold later on, since reviewers have only seen six episodes so far, and the late-season drag the companies’ joint efforts have been prone to will be where this one picks up steam for a change, but that’s a lot of hope to hold out when the opening episodes have been so widely panned. Screen Rant also notes that the series drags right from the get-go, Variety says, “Not one element of this plodding piece works,” and The Hollywood Reporter says:
Iron Fist feels like a step backward [from Marvel’s other Netflix shows] on every level, a major disappointment that already suffers from storytelling issues through the first six episodes made available to critics and would probably be mercifully skippable in its entirety if it weren’t the bridge into the long-awaited Defenders crossover series.
And there’s more. And more. It just never stops.
To be honest, the seeming lack of a single positive review suggests it might be worth skipping anyway and just letting Defenders catch you up on what Danny Rand is all about. To be fair, it’s hard for us to say for ourselves, since we didn’t get screeners and haven’t seen it, but—in addition to trusting TMS founder Susana Polo’s opinions over on Polygon—we defer to this tweet thread by Shaun Lau:
To which I say: the fuck? Usually the onus is on advertising to convince me to take an action. That’s literally what PROMOTION IS FOR.
— Shaun Lau (@NoTotally) March 8, 2017
That’s actually YOUR BAD. You failed in successfully promoting your product. You don’t get to guilt me into buying it anyway.
— Shaun Lau (@NoTotally) March 8, 2017
So far, everything we know about this show points to being just boring at best. We might be curious enough if it’s really as bad as the reviews are saying to check out a few episodes for ourselves, but we certainly wouldn’t blame anyone for deciding that a boring show, on top of casting issues, is just a no-go altogether.
(image via Netflix)
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