Well, no one bats a thousand forever. Pixar made Cars, the Coen brothers made Intolerable Cruelty, and Netflix and Marvel made Marvel’s Iron Fist. The show isn’t a complete trainwreck, but it just feels…unnecessary. It hasn’t made a good case for expanding the Netflix MCU, and frankly seems better suited to the CW than to Netflix. Most of “Snow Gives Way,” Iron Fist‘s underwhelming premiere, has echoes of Arrow‘s pilot episode, if the first thirty minutes were stretched out to fifty-five. Plus, and this is no one’s fault, the timing sucks. Iron Fist can’t help but pale in comparison to Noah Hawley’s Legion on FX, with all its strange, beautiful brilliance.
“Snow Gives Way” at least starts confidently. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it establishes its world pretty quickly. Danny Rand (Finn Jones of Game of Thrones) returns to New York after fifteen years of being presumed dead. He stops by the Rand Enterprises building, asking to see Harold Meachum, and roughs up some security guards when they try to forcibly remove him. I will say that director John Dahl (Rounders, a few episodes of Hannibal) handles the hand-to-hand combat so well, which stands in unfortunate contrast to the fake-looking wire-fu (Danny front-flipping over a taxi looks particularly unconvincing).
Danny manages to gain a brief audience with Harold’s children, Ward (Tom Pelphrey, Banshee) and Joy (Jessica Stroup, 90210), and fails to make a strong enough case for being Danny Rand. Probably because he goes about like a goddamn dumbass, basically repeating “It’s me!” until security removes him. There are a thousand better ways to convince Ward and Joy – childhood memories are a good idea – and none of them occur to Danny for quite a while. If this setup sounds familiar, it’s because the same basic thing happened in Batman Begins, but Bruce Wayne at least had the sense to show up in a suit, whereas Danny shows up barefoot, looking like someone who “found himself” after too many shrooms at Bonnaroo.
The Meachums are problematic characters because they’re so cartoonish. Joy is a little more grounded, and Stroup does a good job with her, but Ward is basically Donald Trump Jr. Danny doesn’t become a problem for Ward until Ward makes him one. Granted, I wouldn’t want to talk to someone who looks crazy and smells worse either, but Danny beats up Ward’s security detail, thwarts an attempted murder, steals Ward’s car, crashes in, and shoves a gun in his face – at what point do you realize you might be outclassed and sit down with someone who says he doesn’t even want money? (On the other hand, I appreciate that Iron Fist takes place in a universe more in tune with that of comics than with our own, the kind of place where corporate security moonlights as assassins.) I did appreciate a last-minute switcheroo from Joy, a nice surprise that indicates she might be more of a Meachum than her friendly demeanor suggests.
It’s a shame that Ward is so ridiculous, because his father Harold is a potentially interesting heavy. Harold is played by David Wenham (300, The Lord of the Rings), who has been itching for a big, meaty villain role, but it doesn’t help with Iron Fist‘s white guy problem. Sure, Danny Rand was white in his original incarnation, but it’s not a great look for Netflix to have a guy as white as Jones talking about Buddha, meditating, and spouting Asian wisdom. Then going up against two other white guys. There’s no reason this show couldn’t have starred The Walking Dead‘s Steven Yuen; we all know his schedule is wide open. And as it is, The Defenders is going to be a pretty white show.
That said, Jones isn’t bad. He handles the physicality of the role nicely, and looks good in a beard. He has an engaging presence that helps make the show more watchable. His accent work is pretty solid, but at times he lapses into his natural British accent. Hopefully that clears up as the season goes on.
The biggest misstep of “Snow Gives Way” is that it ends at the most interesting part, thus far, of Danny’s life. It’s not enough to watch this guy beat up faceless security guards, and while Jones is admittedly good at it, it pales in comparison to the fight scenes in Daredevil, Jessica Jones, or Luke Cage, which is emblematic of Iron Fist‘s general problem thus far: it’s not unique enough. I’ve name-dropped Arrow and Batman Begins, and the show borrows liberally from both, even ending with a Himalayan plane crash similar to, well, the origin stories of Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen. The main difference is, both those characters continued getting interesting once they returned to Gotham and Starling City, and Danny’s story doesn’t grab your attention as much. I mean, this is ostensibly a show about a karate genius, and we watched an hour of him being asked to leave various rooms.
A Few Thoughts
- Wenham gets the episode’s unintentionally funniest line: “When the hell did he learn martial arts?”
- I love Joy’s wardrobe.
- I loved the visuals of the street fair, but it was unfortunately marred by Danny disguising himself in an Asian mask, which is something of a visual metaphor for the show itself.
- I like Colleen Wing a lot, and I think the character has a lot of potential. Probably my favorite part of “Snow Gives Way” was their brief conversation in Mandarin.
2.5/5
About Author
