Latest entry in the NETFLIX MARVEL GRITVERSE: Iron Fist

Poor man's Marvel Batman, starts 3/17!

Will this suck like Daredevil? Will it be riveting like Jessica Jones? Will it be in between like his buddy Luke Cage? So many questions.

apparently this is v bad

word is that it sucks

i hear that it isn't good

early reviews say it's a dud

i am given to understand that it is *poop emoji*

I would be down if each episode was a 60 minute closeup of the poop emoji

wow standards for superhero entertainment really have dropped

surely you mean standards have been raised :p

This seems like a downgrade when they already have an entire Iron Man.

Rodion: "It is a know fact the Mr.Slippery Fist had a hard childhood. However, after he visited the cave and defeated the demon, he realized that he could do anything he wanted to do, and thus became a great hero of his time."

Joe: "Very intresting..."

Rodion discreetly dips his fist into a jar of vaseline...

Rodion (whispers to his fist): "It's time Mr. Slippery Fist...it is time..."

Rodion (yells): "MR SLIPPERY FIST...ENGAGE!!!"

They seem to have his origin story on Urban Dictionary.

Joe: "Oh shit...!"

"i am given to understand that it is *poop emoji*"

no that's patrick stewart

fair

A little birdie told me that he pooped on it.

Seems very slow after watching first 2 episodes. Hoping it might pick up.
Where did the bad reviews turn up. I thought it must have only started yesterday since that's when PB suddenly had all of it.
Will see if episode 3 any better.

Checked out a couple of fight-scenes on youtube, they were almost mind-blowingly bad. How do you make a martial arts show and hire a main actor who can't do martial arts? There was a moment where he jumped up from the floor and struck a pose, and even with a couple of cuts to help him you could see that he lost his balance. Like, what on earth were they thinking?

The show runner is the guy who did the last season of Dexter. So perhaps that answers it.

In any sane world, whoever did that last season of Dexter was cursed into a life of servitude and never let near another fucking tv series.

one of my besties, who I consider a guru on kung fu on tv/cinema, also confirmed the fighting was really horrible and that alone makes me not want to watch it

You should watch Into The Badlands for fun fighting!

although its just your regular generic hong kong-style stuff and the actors aren't experts or anything. still fun.

come to think of it, badlands guy would have been a good iron fist.

http://www.blackbeltmag.com/wp-content/uploads/Into-the-Badlands-2-James-Dimmock-AMC.jpg

Oh good, I was hoping someone would do this. Due to gloom and indifference I ended up watching a load of this and it's fucking terrible. I won't particularly try and order my thoughts, so in no particular order:

The main character is creepy and entitled, and has nothing, as far as I can tell, sympathetic or appealing about him. This is partly the role - wealthy kid learns kung fu, comes back and does wealthy and kung fu. It's partly the actor - his entire manner and speech patterns are expressive of his pass-agg approach to everything (maybe this is what the monks taught him rather than kung fu because he's very good at it). Partly the way he's written - insinuating his way into women's lives and generally privileging his own neediness above any lives anyone else might have.

There was the controversy over the casting, which I was kind of willing to put aside for a bit - tho obviously it's pretty insulting for a brand that has shown itself to be somewhat woke with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, to not really show any thought here. But a) yes it's offensive and b ) they double down on the offensive because he's just so offensively milky and feeble.

The series itself can't work out whether he's a naif, in the Big manner, doing things like playing around on a revolving chair or behaving like a child generally, not really understanding how business works (ah but does the innnocent child have the secret how to TRULY SUCCEED at business sort of thing). It doesn't really commit to that, just slips into it from time to time. Or whether there's a social naivety - a sort of Tarzan model - they can't seem to know how much he should know about the Modern World. So at the beginning it's sort of implied that he doesn't know what the internet is. This is done incredibly badly with a homeless person who's never met iron fist before saying 'You have this thing called the internet which allows to look up anyone'. This is embarrassingly bad writing, and anyway they forget about that whole strand.

The main actor - Finn Jones - is supposed to embody calm and stillness, but looks wobbly when he stands on one leg, which is quite a lot. The fights are truly awful and look like the sort of kung fu reconstruction sort of thing you'd do as a child when trying to imitate kung fu films.

There's one bit where the love interest says to IF 'You don't need to put on that show of bravura you put on for others for me' or something like that which elicited an actual shout WHAT SHOW OF BRAVURA. Bravura is totally absent.

The best character and scenes are the wealthy businessman guy who resents his father, and goes on a drug spiral (after taking superstrong heroin once), and is allowed to have scenes where he just goes back and forth to a swampy park area with dead bodies like some sort of nightmare repetition, and looks at his bank balance to assure himself his life hasn't got out of control. He bulled Iron Fist as a child, and this is a sympathetic character trait.

The whole programme is shot in boxy rooms. There's one bit repeated a couple of times where a couple of monks look down at him in the snow, and you're crying out for a bit of other scenery, ANYTHING other than more talking being done in rooms, and boring businessy things happening with wealthy people. But no. It all takes place in boxes. Talk talk talk talk, in boxes. Crap fighting.

Oh there's loads more. It's really awful.

It's pretty bad. Currently on ep 9 and there's lots more talking in boxy rooms.

The trouble with all the Marvel Netflix shows is that they exist in the same seedy 70s NYC, the one that doesn't really exist in post-Giuliani gentrification. The Taxi Driver NYC, where you're not safe to walk two blocks, that only couple of bloggers and AinNYC still wish was how it was.

The casting controversy is dumb because the character has always been a rich white dude. People can make the valid argument that Marvel COULD have cast a non-white actor in the role but elevating it to the level of a controversy makes no sense. This isn't a 'Tilda Swinton in Dr. Strange' situation.

(FTR, I'm cool with instituting a moratorium on giving white dudes any breaks for a while. It's just harder for me to grumble that a white dude is playing a white dude character.)

Boy this sounds bad. And specifically sounds like what I would have expected an Iron Fist TV show made during the character's heyday to be like (tho one imagines it a little goofier and brighter lit and so on). The only guy who's made me ever give a shit about Iron Fist was Matt Fraction, who went all in on the bonkers K'un-Lun stuff - dragons and demon prisons and the tournament of the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, etc. etc. I also remember thinking he had some kind of interesting angle on Danny Rand and his NYC life/supporting cast but actually I can't recall what any of that was. Anyway it sounds like they've just made a generic and cheap kung-fu show, happy to skip this.

Maybe another way to approach the whiteness question is to say, okay, Iron Fist is an obvious ripoff of David Carradine in Kung Fu, and that's a weird and dated Orientalist trope, and let's not make a show until we have a strong premise that consciously makes something out of that as one of the central concepts. Otherwise you're just remaking Kung Fu, or that Lee Van Cleef/Timothy Van Patten ninja show.

Maybe another way to approach the whiteness question is to say, okay, Iron Fist is an obvious ripoff of David Carradine in Kung Fu, and that's a weird and dated Orientalist trope, and let's not make a show until we have a strong premise that consciously makes something out of that as one of the central concepts

^ my take as well, basically. and, you know, you can just fuck with this stuff generally. I know it's not canon, but this is a playground, and if you want not to cast a blond white dude as Iron Fist, then there are plenty of ways round that, which might involve a thousand times more imagination, invention and interest than this manages. It doesn't help that he comes in like the great white saviour and does a roundhouse like me pretending to be Bruce Lee aged 7 in the garden.

This seems like a downgrade when they already have an entire Iron Man.

― Milkwalker's World (Old Lunch), Friday, March 10, 2017 3:18 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a great post that deserved more recognition than it got

i've watched the first four episodes and this show is really hamstrung by the lead, who is a totally charisma-free blank slate on the order of jai courtney / sam worthington / all those other blandly handsome hunks of semi-sentient spam. i can't imagine him having any best-bud chemistry with mike colter when the two of them meet in the defenders

and yeah the fight scenes are really lacklustre, which seems like the one thing you should be striving to do right above all others in a show about a guy who fights. the combat scenes in daredevil were often great so i dunno what's gone wrong here but damn this is a slog

i'd be down with a non-white Iron Fist but more down with a show that has something to say about the idea of whiteness in stories like Iron Fist. 'cause clearly the "white person goes to THE EAST and attains knowledge which they bring back with them" trope is still very much alive and well, whether it's Darjeeling Limited or, well, Doctor Strange. i'm not sure how you have that cake and also eat the kung fu action stuff but it'd be a place to start.

or if you're not ready to tackle that yet, you could make it specifically about Asian-American relations or something - i mean we've got a president who is a jet-setting new york rich guy whose campaign was peppered with all these paranoid and antagonistic references to Chi-Na so it's not like there wouldn't be things to do with that and Danny Rand. i guess the more you do with k'un-lun though, the more you really need to include three-dimensional and nuanced contemporary non-mythic China to make it clear you're not just stuck in this vortex of shangri-la fantasies. conveniently, as a jet-setting rich guy danny rand could plausibly be going over there all the time - making deals, keeping up old friendships, falling in love with a contemporary novelist or whatever so i don't think that would have to be shoehorned in. might be a nice way to revisit and complicate the imperialist american superhero who "knows no boundaries" in that weird hong kong digression from the dark knight. but it might stretch the boxy-rooms budget just a bit...

to clarify: actually 1000% down with a non-white iron fist, just the other thing i'm babbling about are more up my alley. in a certain way, iron fist's premise is his whiteness, as with Caine in Kung Fu. there's not a lot there besides the tired and problematic "white guy goes to China and learns martial arts" stuff, so either think deeply about that and come up with a hook that interrogates it and makes something of it, or just do some other character. marvel has tons of them lying around after all. whereas i wouldn't even blink at a non-white Spider-Man.

Penultimate episode and it hasn't got much better.

Every time Harold Meacham's name gets mentioned I keep thinking of https://goo.gl/images/4oNQeZ

(Harold Maker, if that didn't work)

They clearly didn't give a shit about having a story to tell, a competent actor in the main role, getting good fight choreography. Anything really. But for some reason, it was really really important that the main guy be white. It's just really hard to shake the feeling that they decided to make an Iron Fist show without having any idea how to do it and what story to tell - I like Fraction & Brubaker's run, but I'm not sure it would fit a Netflix season - mainly because they wanted to do the Defenders and wanted to have at least half the cast be white dudes.

Which hero should they have chosen instead, btw? Who has a story like Jessica Jones / Purple Man that could work for a season?

I feel like the obvious recent story that would be translatable is the Hawguy run. But Jeremy Renner probably wouldn't do that.

going to finally enjoy this marvel series with an asian protagonist and take a big sip of my cup of coffee

A Claire Temple/Night Nurse story about the collateral damage of powers would be cooler than an IF story.

There are like a million great Marvel arcs and dozens of great characters in them. Just blurting out things from off the top of my head: I still like my idea of a light comic series, maybe a buddy cop deal with a couple of D-listers (Incredble Herc would be a good model), or Damage Control (which I think I heard was happening?). Cloak and Dagger need retooling but could be something. Doom 2099 would confuse everybody but potentially be awesome. Prime has a basically solid concept/arc, just needs freshening/tightening up. And hellooooo... Ms. Marvel. Runaways was basically created to be a TV series pitch, ditto Thunderbolts. Not sure how the X-rights work but e.g. Multiple Man is a great and resonant concept that works for a low-budget series.... it's not like Iron Fist is just the very last character left to get adapted. And if they didn't want to address his whiteness they could have done Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.

(Prime was Malibu, I know, but Marvel bought them out and I think still owns the characters.)

a Cloak and Dagger show is happening

not on Netflix tho

they also got pretty close to doing a Runaways film, but I believe it was shelved because it didn't fit into the overall plan for the MCU. Seems like a no-brainer though

Damage Control show is also theoretically happening (although I haven't heard any news about it in a while) (kinda inclined to think they're slowly giving up on MCU TV projects outside of Netflix).

Every time Harold Meacham's name gets mentioned I keep thinking of

― Mud... Jam... Failure... (aldo), Monday, 20 March 2017 6:17 AM (six hours ago)

(Harold Maker, if that didn't work)

― Mud... Jam... Failure... (aldo), Monday, 20 March 2017 6:18 AM (six hours ago)

*googles*

oh OK cool

(Prime was Malibu, I know, but Marvel bought them out and I think still owns the characters.)
yeah as this series had a kid in an adult superhero body and dealt with his sexuality, even if it was done reasonably well... one of the creative team arrested for child porn in recent months, never gonna happen

I also kinda wish it was still the age of random, shitty, totally unfaithful adaptations where you didn't give a shit about respecting the comics or their fans. For example, I can imagine a pretty great, zero-budget Silver Surfer show where he's an alien who comes to earth, takes the form of a good-natured California beach bum, and then surfs around the country solving crimes, familial misunderstandings, crooked land deals, and the like. Or Cypher could just be the host of travel or news programming, where his mutant power is used as an excuse to dub the dialogue of everyone he interviews, so that older people don't have to squint to read subtitles. I dunno, just spitballing here. I think there are lots of great concepts in the Marvel Universe.

Holy shit I did not know that about Gerard Jones. OMG. That's fucking nuts because Prime, well beyond the concept, is full of specific scenes and characters that bring this aspect right to the fore - pedophile gym teacher for example. Teen love interest's mom has the hots for Prime. Wow.

Oh and there was a big storyline where people think *Prime* is a pedophile because he carries around a teenaged boy's change of clothes, and then the Impulse-type teen speedster character covers for him, says they're his because he wants to corner Prime into making him his sidekick. But IIRC, never inquires where the clothes are really from. It goes on and on. Man this is weirding me out because I have always repped for that comic, mostly, but it's really saturated with this stuff.

<choke> The shame! Hit by the snark of sic!

The phone autocorrected what should have read Harold Meaker. The picture was him, Ethel and Dobbin from Rentaghost, a popular children's television show from my youth.

I would be down if each episode was a 60 minute closeup of the poop emoji

― Rachel Luther Queen (DJP), Saturday, 11 March 2017 07:45 (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Poop Emoji For Your Home

Three episodes into this. I'm not going to go any further. I've not watched any of the other three series; is Jessica Jones best then?

*is

Is Defenders' writing possibly going to improve him? Couldn't make him much worse really.
Not seen the comics since my brother's 40+ years ago so assume he was better there or he'd be forgotten totally innit?

tbf there's only so much that writing can do when the guy delivering the dialogue has all the charisma and screen presence of a damp sock

Not seen the comics since my brother's 40+ years ago so assume he was better there or he'd be forgotten totally innit?

For such a second or third string character, Iron Fist has had some unusually classy creators over the years - Gil Kane, exquisitely inked by Dick Giordano, on the origin issue, a short run by Claremont and Byrne that tied into X-Men continuity, a long run of the Power Man/Iron Fist title by Mary Jo Duffy that is fondly remembered, and more recently, even the Matt Fraction written iteration had pages drawn by the late great John Severin. He's definitely punched like unto a thing of iron above his weight.

liked this well enough, obviously the main actor is terrible and the character he plays is even stupider than daredevil (netflix version) which is going some. But 'Bunker' from Banshee is in it so that gets a tick. I'm not a comics person and Jessica Jones is the one out of these 4 series I enjoyed the most but really I'd be all in on a Madame Gau origin story. She's the best character by far in any of these.

The worst parts of Iron Fist were when they had the potential for dialogue that'd actually establish his disconnect from the world and completely left it on the table. For instance, Danny is walking around with a first or second gen iPod that he's apparently held on to throughout a plane crash and being stranded in an otherworldly place.

Could he charge it when he was trapped there? Is he grateful that he can listen to music again now that he's back? Claire compliments him on his musical taste as a kid and they leave it sitting there -- is there a reason why this silver spoon kid had those musical tastes? Why has no one helped him transfer his music on to a new phone or something?

apologies if they actually riffed on any of this in the couple episodes where I left the show rolling while I went to wash dishes

Could he charge it when he was trapped there?

ha, that's what i said about this too

it also briefly plunged me into a well of existential despair when i realised that the ipod, which seems to me like it only came out like five years or so ago, was actually released nearly 16 years ago and is now old enough to act as a signifier of the passing of a significant amount of time

xpost Yeah, no, of course they didn't. That was the first thing I thought of when they showed his iPod: what, has he been charging it with his chi?

I have a perverse desire to rewatch this and construct a writing class based around all of the things they did wrong.

I was plunged into existential despair every time an adult on the show mentioned some cultural touchstone from their childhood that I remember from my late college years.

lol yes

my other thought was that the ipod shown had a hard drive and was the one right before drop protection, so there's no way it'd have survived the crash if he was listening to music at the time

I had the second gen one in what, 2002? sometime when it was newish

The victim approaches

Iron Fist: Finn Jones Ready to Start Training For Season 2 https://t.co/zlUijuBItP pic.twitter.com/VgrRxe10Sg

— Comic Book Resources (@CBR) August 23, 2017

The murderer acts

Exciting. Maybe he'll be in a couple of fight scenes himself https://t.co/xCuJ3xUNUU

— Lexi Alexander ‎ (@Lexialex) August 23, 2017

https://rkcblog.dragondoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MK_FlawlessVictory.jpg

Shot.

Finn Jones Promises #IronFist Season 2 'Is Unlike Anything Seen Before' https://t.co/kWkZY2oAcQ pic.twitter.com/f4GJuPirZf

— Comic Book Resources (@CBR) May 10, 2018

Chaser.

It’ll be good? https://t.co/YjV3XnN4AP

— Ira Madison III (@ira) May 11, 2018

Really, this will be endless.

Worth noting again that Scott Buck was fired as showrunner after running this show and Inhumans into the ground.

I'll hand it to them, I made it through more of Iron Fist than Inhumans. Then again, I made it through ten minutes of Inhumans

didnt even know inhumans was a thing tbh

Seems like Marvel is okay with that. It's looking like it'll be the first MCU thing to not get a release on physical media. Even Iron Fist is getting a Blu-ray release soon.

I hope they flush it all the way down the memory hole so that they can use the inhuman royals in a real project someday

even when i was really into comic books as an adol/teen i had never even heard of the inhumans

As a kid, I could not wrap my mind around Crystal's hair as a reader of 60s FF reprints.

it is truly hilarious as marvel have tried to push the inhumans forward in the comics as being kinda sorta like mutants except they own the movie rights to them

they did some squirrely things when they first pushed it hard, too. moved a couple writers around because they were looking for the "right take" on the inhumans, which seemed to be "exactly like x-men"

I'm still a year and change behind but basically none of Marvel's recent Inhumans stuff has done anything for me.

Well there's this

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-first-pictures-from-iron-fist-season-2-include-a-ba-1827830959

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--kgmBB-YK--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/vgzeietcysyx1zi2guuz.png

Jeph Loeb cosplayed as Akira Yoshida to promote Iron Fist at SDCC.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DigrWzOUwAAHKxF.jpg

They laid some groundwork for Daughters of the Dragon in the most recent season of Luke Cage. I hope they get their own show at some point, as I'd rather see that than another season of Duddy Rand.

best part of his appearance on the Luke Cage show was that he remembered how to speak English and no longer "Speaks. Like. This."

You might think Marvel would be more cautious with white people pretending to be Japanese

Had no idea they'd bothered to make a 2nd series after the first was the first one of these Netflix versions i never got through. BUt just seen series 2 is up on torrent sites.
Has it got any better?

i had no idea it wa out yet, but the opening line of matt soller zeitz's review which i just saw seems... unpromising: "Iron Fist season two is an improvement on Iron Fist season one in the way that stubbing your toe is an improvement over jamming your finger in a car door."

lmao

Got through the first two episodes and shit the bed, this is terrible. A country mile better than S1 but still dreadful.

Typhoid Mary should be a great introduction but so far all she's done is walk round dazed and try to pick up Danny. It also doesn't help that the actress playing her is the double of Trish(? the one who ends up taking Nuke's druqs) from Jessica Jones or that in fact pretty much all the white people look the same.

The highlight so far is when some young kids try to hustle Danny and Colleen's favourite restaurant by putting a spike through a waitress' head and the Triad the restaurant owner is paying protection to turn up to sort out the young gang. Danny and Colleen defuse the situation by beating both sets of criminals up, trashing the restaurant in the process, to the great and eternal thanks of the owner.

10 episodes is a far, far better length.

Still not really any good, but quite balanced in terms of plot and didn't ever feel like it had too many characters or filler episodes.

Wearying by the end though after EVERY SINGLE FIGHT turned into the one from They Live.

SPOILERS

Colleen Wing is Iron Fist now and Danny is just a rich kid who knows a bit of Kung Fu. It seems to be set up that she's going to have a detective agency with Misty Knight because "knight... wing... has a certain detective ring to it". Which is possibly an interesting route for the Gritverse to go down.

EVERY SINGLE FIGHT turned into the one from They Live.

i’ll be honest, this is the first thing i’ve read that might make me wanna give this a chance

I don't want to mislead you, you absolutely shouldn't.

MORE SPOILERS

I posted before the epilogue. Colleen is Iron Sword and Danny is Iron Pistols now. No, me neither.

Didn't realize this was only 10 episodes! Very smart, Marvel. Wish you'd learned some restraint before now, but better late than never.

I guess I'm actually halfway through now. After a verrrrrry shaky, 'do I actually gaf about this anymore?' start, it's gotten pretty dece. I really dug Mary once the Typhoid began to manifest.

Finn is still the absolute worst, natch.

i still haven't finished luke cage s2, i dunno if i have the fortitude to even start iron fist

the formula of these netflix series has really worn thin tbh, and i'd never have guessed that the punisher would end up being the best of them

These would've been great as like six-episode minis. As is, the episodes are far-too-often like a single comic issue whose plot has been so unnecessarily stretched out that it takes an hour to read.

I'm often unsure whether it's just bad writing or if the writers very consciously give ol' Finn dialogue that makes his character sound dumb as a post. 'I'll never forget my mother's last words. She told me she loved me.' I'll never forget the last thing my father gave me. It was a sandwich.

the writing probably doesn't help but like jon bernthal and mike colter are good actors and charismatic screen presences so they can sell sub-par writing much more effectively than finn jones, who is more tepid pond water than man

Lol OL

Xp

Have only watched Jessica Jones S1, and get the feeling that's the best of all these Netflix gritversethings. Never got round to S2 because I enjoyed the villain of S1 much more than the main character.

season two of jessica jones is extremely bad, avoid like the plague imo

I basically like every actor on this show except for the one who's playing the title role.

Somehow I'm still wading through this. I think the only actor I actually like is Simone Missick (Misty).

Finished last night. An incredibly low bar to clear, I know, but this was better than the first season by a factor in the double digits. I might even go so far as to recommend it. Finn never gets any less awful, though.

I guess I've never seen Alice Eve in anything but her inauspicious turn in the second Star Trek film but I will be keeping an eye on her now. She's real good.

Womp womp

https://deadline.com/2018/10/marvel-iron-fist-canceled-netflix-daredevil-disney-finn-jones-jessica-henwick-1202482048/

there is still some justice in this cruel, uncaring world i guess

^