I don’t hate Danny Rand or his actor as much as some seem to. In this iteration, Danny was a 10 year old kid traumatized by the death of his parents and a plane crash and then immediately stuffed into training to be a weapon with no chance to process it. I thought they did a good job of portraying someone who was emotionally frozen 15 years back.
I hated Colleen Wing. The comic book character’s fairly bland (unlike Misty Knight) so they had anything they wanted from her. The anger-filled rage monkey personality she had left me flat and I don’t think the actress was up to it. Also the “romance” between Danny and Colleen had…negative chemistry? anti-chemistry? Night Nurse was right when she said they were bad for each other, but not only are characters bad for each other, but the actors are bad for each other.
The storytelling/pacing was just abysmal. What we needed was a half-episode long flashback around episode 5 or 6 that showed Danny meeting the monks, being taken in for training, growing older (but not growing up) with Davros, actually meeting the Dragon and eventually leaving K’un Lun. Show us how he never had a chance to grieve/process. Show us a bit of his training. Hell, show us K’un Lun so we have a reason to care about it.
More Madame Gao. But…that goes for all Marvel TV shows. She rocks.
Too many fights and not nearly enough Iron Fist. It’s a cheap effect to do. You can use it more than about 6 times in 13 episodes.
The pacing seemed way, way off. The first eight or so episodes moved too slowly and the last 5 were just rushed. And too much padded fight scenes.
The reason the fight scenes are off, I hear, is because the lead actor has zero martial arts experience. Which, hello? He’s a martial arts character, there are a million martial artists in Hollywood (even if you limit casting to white guys) who would love the role and be able to carry the physical stuff.
So that’s why there’s so many quick cuts, etc - it’s a classic “Our Main Guy Can’t Actually Do The Work” trick.
This might be a good use of the entitled, emotionally stunted man-child archetype, but by God that archetype has been played out in recent years in everything from “Knocked Up” to “The White House.” I’m heartily sick of it and have very little sympathy left for such characters.
Eh, he’s not a 10 year old, he’s also been living in some crazy Kung-fu dimension for 15 years, so his view of how the world works is based on 15 year old memories of when he was 10. I thought it was believable, and kinda liked his naive wandering around NYC. I actually wished they’d played up that aspect of the character more. It made him more likable than in later episodes, and gave him a hook so he wasn’t such a blank slate as he became in the later.
Yea. She was also by far the worst actress in any of the Marvel shows I’ve watched (though I haven’t seem them).
Heh, can you imagine how much the internet would’ve lost its shit if they’d had Rand stumbling around speaking broken English in a faux-Chinese accent.
There have been a couple stories about Finn Jones desperately trying to spin the press the show has been getting, and at one point, apparently, he blamed the poor reaction the show got on the election of Donald Trump. When I read that before seeing the show, I thought it was bullshit. Now, about 2/3rds through… I mean, I don’t think the show would have been any better received if Hillary were in the White House, so it still fails as an excuse for the shows reviews. But watching Danny Rand try to do business is wierdly reminiscent of watching Trump try to do government. Like, the subplot about the power plant maybe giving a bunch of people cancer. Danny talks to a plaintiff for, like, five seconds, and he’s all “Shut down the plant until we know what’s going on!” Which just sounded so much like Trump talking about Syrian refugees. Danny, just because you don’t know what’s going on, doesn’t mean that nobody knows what’s going on. What steps do you imagine you need to taken to determine “what’s really going on,” and how do you know they haven’t already been taken?
I finished watching today and I agree that this is certainly the weakest of the Marvel Netflix shows, though it was still enjoyable.
The highlights were Madame Gao and the Ward character arc; which goes to show unfortunately how weak the main character of the series was. Danny was interesting, or at least sympathetic when he was trying to recover his sense of family a motivation that could be understood. And it could have been played up by having shown how he was, if not exactly shunned, at least not accepted during his time in K’un L’un. Then you could have had a much more interesting arc of someone who finds that they don’t really belong in either life.
A big disappointment for me was how the martial arts were portrayed with one notable example being Colleen Wing, who supposedly trained in Japanese martial arts, but has a very Chinese way of fighting. There were some parts where you could see some of the differences between how she and Danny fought, but most of the time they looked very similar. They could have made an effort to show some differences like Jet Li did in the movie The One where he played two physically identical characters but used different fighting styles for each. Of course not everyone can be Jet Li:p.
The end scene with Joy was a big disappointment as well. She went from, “hey we screwed Danny”, to “let’s kill him” in like 0 seconds. Davos being resentful, that was understandable, but Joy? there was nothing in the series that would cause one to believe such a drastic change.
I did like how they used Claire to cut through some of the nonsense the characters were thinking/saying as well as the fact that she had a more physical role.
Anyway, it could have certainly been better, but it still kept me engaged enough to keep watching the whole series.
[spoiler]Agree it’s weird how Ward went from the bad guy to being the good guy, apparently, and Joy went from good guy to “I want him dead.” I like it though.
Why is Davos sticking around? Did you pop on over to the Himalayas and find Xanadu gone, or he never went back?[/spoiler]
After I finished the last ep Netflix cued up Daredevil to watch, so I watched an ep to compare it with Iron Fist, to be sure my perceptions weren’t off. The difference in quality is really stark, from the video format they used to film it, to the acting, writing, directing, dialogue etc. Iron Fist just seems like such an amateur production. I’ve seen better work on fan-made films on Youtube.
So, Madame Gao is the Daredevil Dragon Lady, right, who paints cherry blossoms on teacups while wearing a kimono and eating fortune cookies with chopsticks while selling opium and being inscrutable, right? If it’s the same character, does she become any less of a walking talking stereotype, or does she keep on keeping on? She’s not in the first episode, so I’m not sure :).
Yep. Only watchable parts for me. And Harold, because… I have a friend whose dad is a carbon copy of that guy (including the money / power, but excluding (as far as I know) the back-from-the-dead thing) and it’s weird seeing that personal a dynamic on the screen.
Danny just irks me. He reacts to everything like a spoiled child who will just rage rage rage if he doesn’t get his way, or if anyone insults him. At all. I understand the cultural fish-out-of-water thing, but he’s still an adult, right? He was taught incredible willpower and focus to become the Iron Fist, right? None of that shows.
I’ve got three episodes left, and I’m just kinda hate-watching it now.
I also want a Madame Gao spin-off series. Not with her as a hero. Something with the interior workings of The Hand.
They never followed up on two interesting things: she tossed Danny into a wall with a wave of the back of her hand, and she mentioned having been around since the 1700’s. Neither seemed to startle any of the show’s characters. Later when Danny and Connie were talking to Gau in the Hand “prison” they were still acting like she was an old woman they could beat up if they wanted to.
So yeah, a series about her would be far more interesting than another season of Iron Fist. They could cast a younger actress to play her in her younger days, whenever that was.
I want my Madame Gao in measured doses. I want the mystery, which a series focused on Gao would take away. I don’t want her backstory. I like the way that she’s been doled out in small doses in the Daredevil and Iron Fist series. The mystery is what makes her interesting. Remove that, she’s just another character.
This gets at something I’ve been wondering about. The defense of his manchildosity is something about how his parents died when he was ten, and he’s been away from Western civilization the last fifteen years, and he didn’t know how things work.
Okay–but plenty of 25-year-old dudes have been away from Western civilization for all 25 of their years, and when they visit New York for the first time ever, they don’t act like spoiled clueless brats. The fifteen years he spent in a monastery: couldn’t they teach him how to act like a grown-ass man there? I mean sure, when he comes back, there are gonna be some cultural hiccups, like okay maybe he really hates wearing shoes, sure; but the temper tantrums, the threatening women by cornering them repeatedly, that sort of shit: that’s a failure of monks to give him some basic character education.
Meanwhile, my wife and I just started streaming another show about a self-absorbed white dude who violates social norms while treating women poorly and fighting like a motherfucker: Justified’s fifth season. Difference is, Timothy Olyphant is charming as hell, and the show is well-written and balances humor with action, and even when Raylon is being an asshole, you can’t help but root for him.
I have to agree as well, some exposition would be interesting, but a complete series? Definitely not, I mean, look at what happened to Darth Vader…:smack:
I really enjoyed it, too. I never read a great deal of Power Man & Iron Fist, but Danny Rand and Luke Cage should be interesting as a team. Did their stint in the Defenders comic predate or post-date their being a crime-fighting duo?
Post. They were very much Johnny-come-latelies in a later version of the group in the mid-1990’s. Heroes for Hire ( like the original, very different Defenders ) stretches back to the 1970’s.
Danny Rand (and Davos!) supposedly have spent all of this time training, and are SUPPOSED to have absolute control over their emotions, but 75% of their screen time is devoted to ridiculously over-the-top emotional outbursts. My wife and I were both baffled by this, and decided that the monks at K’un Lun were obviously just shit at training people.
Maybe that explains Danny’s obvious lack of real martial arts ability…