...Hate to be that guy, but reviewing a series based on two episodes is a little flimsy. Still, your opinion is your opinion, and if you have a negative one, that\'s just fine.
^In the words of Roger Ebert (paraphrased): \"Q: How can you give this a bad review based on just two episodes? A: The negative score is just for those two episodes. After that, you\'re on your own.\"
^^ if you told me I had to sit through 8 hours of tedium before I got a reward, I would just go to work instead of, you know, watching TV.
It doesn\'t have to be a shining gem from the very first episode. But if it\'s so crappy that it\'s work to get through, then no, I would agree with people who say the series is simply not worth the time. Take Star Trek TNG for example. Everyone says it gets much better in season 2. But that doesn\'t mean sitting through shit for an entire season. Season 1 was good. Season 2 was just better.
In addition to all the other complaints already listed, the fight scenes in Iron Fist were horrible. They desperately needed to put a mask on Danny so that they could trade a stunt double who actually can do believable looking hand-to-hand in for Finn Jones.
It\'s the editing that really kills it. I remember watching the first episode - there\'s a bit where he jumps on a guy and throws him down a staircase. There are like three cuts in the space of a few seconds, and the staircase is barely visible in one of those cuts before he gets thrown down it. I found myself going \"wait what? Where\'d the stairs come from?\"
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Glass Jaw
There is a lot to say about Iron Fist, but the first thing I should mention is I only managed to watch two episodes before giving up. I have been told the second half of the show is much better than the first, but there is no way I will recommend sitting through seven hours of tedium to get there when I couldn’t manage two.
Iron Fist tells the story of Danny, the billionaire kung-fu master. His plane crashed in the Himalayas and he’s been living in a Buddhist monastery for the last 15 years. Now he’s back in New York and he’s having a really hard time convincing everyone of who he really is. It’s not surprising, because he looks exactly like a scruffy trust fund kid who’s just come back from his “enlightenment” yoga holiday in Goa. Apparently it doesn't occur to him how crazy he sounds to other people, so he consoles himself with hip hop on a fifteen year old i-pod (the battery of which inexplicably still works). 15 years is a long time. In 15 years, we’ve already had this plot done by Iron Man and Batman Begins. Hell, Nolan’s Batman had time for two spiritual awakenings in Asia. It’s a Karate Kid fantasy that acts as a teenage primer for those mighty whitey, Avatar type stories, and people find them really boring these days.
This one is especially boring. I’m not exaggerating when I say most of the two episodes I watched consists of this same, redundant scene in which people hang around a sterile office, wondering out loud if Danny is who he says he is. The writing in this is utterly terrible too. One that sticks out to me is when Danny tells a psychiatrist his ordeal when the plane crashed in the Himalayas, and how there was a blizzard and snow everywhere. “That must have been cold”, offers the psychiatrist. Yeah. nice work, Doctor.
The final insult is that there is scarcely any Kung-fu in the damn show up to this point. When there is an action scene it is over before it begins, no doubt in its eagerness to get things back to another watercooler chat. All the previous Marvel tv shows have pacing issues, but they usually fill the time by exploring some interesting themes or perspectives, whether it’s a struggling lawyer’s Catholic guilt, or a super powered rape survivor, or a black ex-con seeing his neighbourhood combat gentrification. No wonder you hear people complaining about Iron Fist’s white protagonist; dated story telling conventions besides, we are used to Netflix Marvel shows doing much better with their leads, and by contrast, poor Danny feels like someone used all the default settings in the RPG character creation and forgot to write in a personality.