I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment. After watching the new season of Daredevil I didn’t have much investment in future Marvel TV shows. Frankly, nearly all of them have been disappointing and some of them have been outright embarrassing. After watching the first three episodes of Ironheart last night, I can say it leans toward the latter.
Ironheart is basically a race and gender-swap version of Iron Man. The character first appeared in the comics in 2016, eight years after Robert Downey Jr. made the original Iron Man film into a somewhat unlikely hit. Here’s a summary of the character from Wikipedia:
Riri Williams is a 15-year-old engineering student and the daughter of the late Riri Williams Sr. Following her father’s death, Riri lives with her mother Ronnie and her paternal Aunt Sharon in Chicago. A certified super-genius, she attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a scholarship. Working alone, Riri designs a suit of armor similar to the Iron Man Armor using material stolen from campus.
The look of the show is pretty good. Thanks to the reported $100-$150 million budget, for just six episodes, the special effects are better than what a TV show usually gets.
So what’s the problem here? The writing, mostly.
In the original Iron Man, Tony Stark was a bored, alcoholic playboy who hadn’t done much with his talents besides make weapons. Then he gets blown up and trapped in a cave and forced to create something extraordinary to escape. And from the moment he does that he is in conflict with the people who were stealing and misusing his weapons. He really becomes a hero, at first, by protecting people from those same terrorists.
In Ironheart, Riri Williams is a genius inventor who makes a copy of the Iron Man suit but does so by selling completed projects to other MIT students. She needs the money to build her suit because, unlike Tony Stark, she’s not a billionaire. Selling her ideas seems harmless enough but MIT finds out and expels her.
Things take a turn when Williams returns to Chicago and, in no time, agrees to join a crew of thieves run by a sketchy guy with a hooded cloak who works out of a pizza shop. She joins them even after they trap her in an elevator that will suffocate her if she can’t figure out how to escape. This is her test to see if she’s really up to the job and she passes and somehow is only upset for about a minute that they threatened to kill her. The Hood promises riches if she’ll do three jobs for him and she agrees.
And just like that, Williams goes from ghost-creating academic assignments to what could probably be called terroristic threats and mob-like control of a major company. The plan is to sabotage an underground tunnel system for transporting cars around Chicago created by a company called TNNL (tunnel). I think we actually get one line in the script where one of the cartoonishly silly members of the crew says the owner of TNNL is a rich b*tch who is destroying neighborhoods in the city. And that’s it.
On the basis of “rich people bad” Williams agrees to help ruin a test of the system to force the CEO to hire the crew of thieves with off-books salaries of six-figures each. That involves breaking into the HQ and beating the crap out of a bunch of security guards. The Hood literally presents the CEO with a contract (who wrote the contract for him?) which she signs to avoid having her entire company destroyed. At this point, if you have an IQ above 70 you may be thinking that contracts signed under duress aren’t valid. Everyone involved in this plot would be going to jail once the CEO filed a police report.
But none of that happens. Instead, we get a final scene where Williams is almost stopped by a security guard outside who has a gun. The Hood “rescues” her by shooting him. He drops to the ground. Is he dead? We’re not sure but The Hood assures Williams he’ll be fine and she just leaves.
After this moment of nearly killing a guy doing his job, we get a slow-motion scene of the crew of villains back in the pizza joint throwing bundles of cash up in the air like an old school rap video. It’s a good thing TNNL’s CEO didn’t go to the police because the lair is literally papered with evidence of their crime.
Williams barely seems bothered by the beatings, shooting and extortion. She’s too busy working on her suit which involves extortion of another character who we later find out is the son of Obadiah Stane, Tony Stark’s villainous boss in the first movie. Williams threatens him to get parts for her suit and he goes along with it because he’s a pushover.
Then in episode three we get the crew’s second robbery. This one involves breaking into a cutting edge greenhouse run by another rich person. Again, we get one line about him “putting local farmers out of work” and that’s the only justification given for why targeting him should be okay with the audience.
Personally, I was thinking, ‘Wait, so this guy has created new farming techniques that are better than anything we have?’ That seems like it could be pretty beneficial to a lot of people. I mean, someone is going to eat all that food, right? If he’s able to undersell every farmer around that seems like a real breakthrough. The thinking in this show never runs that deep.
The crew breaks in to this techno greenhouse and The Hood confronts the rich owner (who like the owner of TNNL is white). The owner offers The Hood a check to just leave and The Hood says it’s not enough and demands he sign another pre-written contract under duress (Who is the Hood’s attorney?). Again, this is illegal and stupid and wouldn’t hold up in court but that’s the plan. When the rich owner guy refuses the Hood murders him. Williams, who is trying to get a sample of his cloak to analyze, is in the room when this happens and does nothing except try to escape. The rest of the crew of thieves are trapped and suffocating in the greenhouses and she rescues them, all except for one guy who tried to kill her. She leaves him behind to suffocate.
So at this point, Riri Willams -girl genius, has gone from breaking the MIT honor code to extortion and now accomplice to murder. She didn’t physically kill the greenhouse owner but she’s part of the plot to extort him and doesn’t stop him from being killed. So halfway through this show my take is that Riri Williams is a self-absorbed brat who has literally been given a golden ticket and a free ride to MIT but who decides she can’t use her vast talents to get a real job in Palo Alto because those people are beneath her. Instead she joins a group of thieves who are murdering and extorting people so she can become an icon like Tony Stark.
There’s one scene where each member of the crew explains what they plan to do with the money. One wants to open a restaurant. One wants to start a school. It’s like a very thin attempt to make this group of villains into anti-heroes. They are stealing from the rich to give to…well, themselves really. Maybe The Hood is supposed to be a Robin Hood figure but setting him up that way would require some attention to the people he’s robbing and killing. Are they more corrupt and villainous than he is? It doesn’t seem so. In the show the fact that they are rich seems to be a stand in for them being evil even though we don’t see them doing anything wrong.
I’m sure there’s some character arc coming and a lesson about not being a greedy dirtbag. My problem is that there are only three more episodes left and clearly Riri Williams, one of the smartest girls in the world, hasn’t figured out that she’s a thief and, legally speaking, a murderer. Despite seeing this all happen up close, it still hasn’t registered with her that she’s the villain.
If Tony Stark were blown up and trapped in a cave and then agreed to go on three missions with the terrorists, missions in which innocent people are threatened, shot and murdered- that’s the plot of Ironheart. The main character we’re supposed to be rooting for is a villain by choice on only the flimsiest of pretenses (putting famers out of business, ruining neighborhoods). It’s as if the anti-capitalist core of the show is being asked to justify everything up to and including murder and no one in the writing room stopped and thought ‘hey, maybe this doesn’t really work.’
Just to point out that I’m not the only person who noticed, here’s what Polygon had to say about the show:
Riri isn’t a particularly compelling protagonist. Her primary motivations are fear and ambition, which are an intentional parallel to Tony Stark – especially the panic attacks she has are reminiscent of Tony’s issues in Iron Man 3. Yet Thorne can’t compete with Robert Downey Jr.’s charisma, nor do the scripts tee her up for powerful moments. Riri lacks Tony’s fast-talking swagger or powerful demonstrations of heroism or kindness that could balance her arrogance and the callous way she treats people around her.
And here’s the NY Times doing its best to gloss over, without entirely ignoring, how badly constructed this show is.
Setting the tone and underpinning much of the plot, though, are the moral choices Riri must face up to, and the contemporary political and cultural context in which those choices are set. The show, which was created by the screenwriter and poet Chinaka Hodge, is not very successful at elevating those ideas into appealing storytelling the way that Ryan Coogler (an executive producer of the series) was able to do in the first “Black Panther” film.
That might not matter in a short season if Riri herself held our attention, but unfortunately, she, too, is more a set of ideas — about race, gender, place, trauma — than a flesh and blood character. “Ironheart” is supposed to be her coming-of-age story, but we don’t get a clear enough sense of her to be involved in her progress.
I don’t want to dump on the actors in this show. I honestly think the person who plays Riri’s AI friend Natalie is pretty great. But the Times is right that it would have taken an Oscar-level actress to make something out of this badly written mess. The star of this show is fine, probably better than a lot of TV actresses, but she’s not Robert Downey Jr.
And as I suggested above, I’m not sure anyone could have saved this plot. Would people have loved Tony Stark after he agreed to join the terrorists for three missions? I’m not sure even Downey Jr. could make that work.
