Welcome to the Second Union Iron Fist Watchalong Event! Watch along with us for the next several weeks as we check out the next “hero in the making” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage). Iron Fist’s entire first season was made available for viewing on Friday, March 17th on Netflix. Every weekend (Saturday and Sunday) starting Saturday, March 25th we will post overviews and opinion of an episode of the series. WARNING: This article is full of SPOILERS!
If you haven’t already, read the previous article for “Shadow Hawk Takes Flight”.
Welcome to my review of Marvel’s Iron Fist – Episode 3. As always, this will be split into three categories: Story, Action, and Writing. Let’s begin.
STORY
This episode mainly finds Danny trying to regain his honor, by working with lawyer Jeri Hogarth. This episode was a tad boring, to say the least. It had two great (albeit short) fight sequences, and I’ll get to those in a bit, but the majority of this episode was Danny walking around, asking questions, etc. Not the greatest or most interesting episode. Meanwhile, Colleen participated in a private fight club (one of her students broke the rule by talking about it), and she goes up against an intimidating opponent. She wins, but not before he chomps down real hard on her. Ouch. Then, we have this kind of disturbing subplot with Joy manipulating a doctor, that’s so minor I’m not even going to bother talking about it. Oh, and that “reference” from Episode 2? It was setting up events to come. The Hand is actually a part of this story now, apparently. Aside from that, the ending was really abrupt, but overall, an okay cliffhanger.
ACTION
As I previously mentioned, there are two “big” fight scenes in “Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch”. One is the fight club scene with Colleen Wing, and the other features Danny and a thug at the hospital while the former is looking for medical records. Unfortunately, the duel between them causes a fire. The cage fight between Colleen and her violent adversary is pretty well done. It’s reminiscent of scenes like the one in Spider-Man (2002), but it overall still has a bit of a way to go before it gets to that level of quality. The cinematography and editing aren’t terrible here, but the choreography could’ve been a little better. Neither scene is completely disappointing, but, as I said, the show still has a lot of work to do in this category.
WRITING
Ah, here we go, another category that has yet to live up to its full potential. The writing in “Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch”…it wasn’t great. There was a lot of crappy dialogue, and some just really weird things going on, like the doctor-manipulation subplot. It just made no sense. Danny’s brief physical abuse of one of Colleen’s students was completely uncalled for, and, I can understand that he was trained to take this stuff very seriously, but you don’t have to whack a teenager with a staff over it. In addition to that, there’s a really bad piece of dialogue after Danny’s quarrel in the file room in which Joy tells Danny to go away after he tries talking to her and Ward, and then she immediately reverts to old Joy, says for the hundredth time how unfair they’re treating Danny.
Overall, Episode 3 was a bit of a step down in terms of overall quality. The action is a moderate step up from the past two episodes, but it still has a lot to work on. I’m going to give “Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch” a 7/10.
