Iron Fist S1 Review

Apologies for taking so long with this. The show was so meh it had a hard time holding my attention until about episode ten.

The guy in the opening credits doesn't look like Finn Jones. It looks like they used some guy who's actually good at martial arts for the motion capture. Maybe they used Lewis Tan back when the role was supposed to go to him.

Most of the information we get about K'un-L'un is rather vague. There's very little original about it, except for the trial of Shou-Lao, which wasn't even well-explained. He's supposed to plunge his fists into the heart of a dragon, but I don't think they even used the word dragon. They just show two glowing red eyes. The rest of the stuff Danny tells us about K'un-L'un is generic enough that it could have been cherry-picked from any warrior monk story.

Danny could have tried a lot harder to convince Joy and Ward that he actually was who he said he was. He made very little effort to tell them things that only Danny Rand would know. He mostly just says a couple sentences and expects them to believe him. It isn't until the story about the TV commercial that anyone believes he's Danny Rand. He could have told them a story like that from the start.

This show is definitely lacking a strong, central villain. It's supposed to be the Hand, but Madame Gao is defeated halfway through, and Bakuto is only in a few episodes. Then there's the question of what exactly the Hand's evil plan is. The only thing we really saw them do is sell drugs. We never even found out what Bakuto was planning. The other problem is that if the Hand is the main villain, why was the final battle against Harold?

Davos' introduction is rather weird. When we first meet him, he attacks a food truck worker in order to stake out Rand Tower. We don't get any explanation of who he is until two episodes later. At first, I thought he was a villain, although that end scene makes it look like he will be one.

So now, at the last episode before the Defenders, 2/4 of them aren't even in New York. Luke is in prison in Georgia and Danny is in China. I'm unclear on whether K'un-L'un was somehow destroyed, or if the entry just closed. That will determine whether Danny tries to stick around to see what happened.

I can definitely see what other people were saying about Finn's poor acting. His emotional range leaves something to be desired. The martial arts scenes definitely looked like more like he was following a script than that he had done significant training. This was most noticeable in the scene where Bakuto was teaching Danny how to recharge his chi. It looked like he was just going through motions without much care.

There's one other thing I wanted to mention, but I thought of it after I went to bed and neglected to write it down. Oh well.