Iron Fist - 'Felling Tree with Roots', 'The Blessing of Many Fractures' and 'The Mistress of All Agonies'

"It'll be fine, he said. We'll ask the Yakuza for help, he said..."

A short binge on Iron Fist while I was washing up (it was a lot of washing up, okay) took me through episodes 7-9 of the weakest of the Defenders pre-sequels. Since I've not watched anything else to round up, let's just call this an Iron Fist review rather than a TV Roundup.

After the hot mess of the Tournament of Death, Danny interrupts Harold assuring the Hand's lackeys that he has no idea what's up with Danny, and lackey-death ensues. Danny is all shocked about this, because his attitude to death is all over the shop. Harold has Ward help him hide the bodies, which together with emptying his secret embezzled pension fund account tips Ward from regular filial disgruntlement to actual patricide. Harold fails to stay dead, but is tipped a little more to the dark (from his fairly murky starting point,) by the experience, later murdering hapless aide Kyle over the finer choice of ice cream(1).

Zhou Cheng; a visitor from a more interesting show.

Danny teams up with the Triads to take out the Hand's factory, but Gao has got the synthetic heroine formula and left. She heads for China, with Danny, Colleen and for some reason Claire in hot pursuit. There, Danny faces off with drunken master Zhou Cheng, who is easily the most interesting character to have appeared in the course of the series. Danny flips out and almost beats Cheng to death, then captures Gao after he and Colleen defeat her remaining goons. They somehow bring a captive, elderly Asian woman back to New York and tie her up in the dojo to find out how she knew his parents. On sodium pentathol she claims that his mother introduced her to his father, and she had him killed because he found out that she was moving drugs using Rand infrastructure and assisted by Harold, but it turns out that she's immune to sodium pentathol, so who knows.

Goons attack and are repelled, but Colleen starts dying of a poisoned wound. She asks Danny to call her Sensei, Bakuto, who turns up and teaches Danny to use the Iron Fist to heal. This, however, causes him to black out from over-exerting his chi and Bakuto and Colleen bundle him into a van for reasons as yet unexplored.

"I still own you."

In the almost entirely divorced corporate shenanigans, Joy tries to get him to back off on the poisoning, only for Danny to go all crusader (incredibly, Danny is more interesting as a corporate nice guy than as a martial arts hero,) after which the Board fires Danny and both Meachams and Joy begins planning to blackmail the entire Board, because she's the baller. Honestly, this subplot would be better off in Daredevil, or even Jessica Jones (who may in fact be the PI providing Joy with her dirt.) Oh, and Danny and Colleen have first aid sex, I almost forgot for caring so much(2).

My good friend James defines the problem of Iron Fist as a failure to embrace its own genre, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Faced with the issues of whitewashing and cultural appropriation in the original comics, which were essentially based on exported, Hong Kong chop socky movies, the makers of the series would appear to have decided that Something Has to Be Done, and to have decided that that something is to keep the white saviour (albeit in this case failed white saviour) narrative and uncomfortable appropriation, while dropping all of the far out elements that make 1970s and 80s Hong Kong martial arts movies so much fun. The result is still burdened with all the original issues – my solution to this, while still keeping the essential narrative? Cast Danny Rand as a Chinese-American rich boy whose wealthy family were heavily distanced from their original cultural roots. Bam! Job done(3) – and  is painfully dull to boot.

This guy shows up this week, knocks out a food cart vendor and sits, watching
the Rand building and making throwing stars out of tin foil. That's way more
cool than Danny rabbiting on about the Iron Fist.

I picked out Zhou Cheng as a highlight of the series so far because he has a distinctive, flamboyant style – so, so important in a martial arts heavy piece – that makes him more interesting to watch than the other fights. The Tournament of Death should have had this, and did a little bit, but squandered it with low-key differences in style and turning the Bride of Nine Spiders – one of the Immortal Weapons, incidentally, just like the Iron Fist – into a lame sexy spider seductress. During the fight, Zhou Cheng goads Danny by reminding him that they both swore oaths to protect; he the Hand and Danny Kun-Lun, but that only one of them is still at his post. Danny retorts that he who fights with words has weak fists, but seriously, I could do with a lot more talking in these fight scenes.

Every fight in a king fu movie or series is a form of dialogue, and in the absence of an eloquent style a little more philosophy might not go amiss. Danny has never been more interesting than in his opening scenes, when he wove through the Rand security like a ghost, never striking and barely blocking, just evading every attack. That's what I mean by an eloquent style, telling us both that he was skilled and that he didn't want to hurt anyone. Colleen on the other hand has been more brutal from the get-go. Unfortunately, Danny's style in particular is as uneven as his characterisation. I could understand contrasting his soft-style with the shattering power of the Iron Fist, but he pretty much goes in hard most of the time, even without the Fist. Similarly, he's all shocked when Harold kills people, then talks about executing Gao and how the Iron Fist is supposed to annihilate the Hand a lot; his motives and morals are all over the place. Sure, maybe he's just talking a good – or bad – fight, but it all adds up to a character with no focus, no centre. It's hard to imagine how this guy gets his shit together enough to summon the Iron Fist when he can't even seem to decide who he is.

(1) Also a sick burn on Ward and Joy, since when Hand resurrection makes you crazy, you're supposed to kill those closest to you first.

(2) Seriously; it's like his shirt is off and there's some weird magnetism going on. Magnetism in the sense that you can see the effects, but the force itself is invisible and intangible and no-one can really say on a fundamental level how it works.

(3) Almost. I mean, also hire some Asian or Asian-American scriptwriters. And more people who understand kung fu movies.