Well, after watching the Defenders, it's clear that Daredevil could. lol
I still couldn't believe the Defenders bit where he basically cuffed Danny to a chair. It's like c'mon, we all know Matt is ten times the fighter and badass Danny is but they just straight up showed it on film of him handing his ass to him, pretty easily too. The greatest fucking irony being of course that Matt is supposed to be his army and is in fact the entirety of his army in one man who slapped him around like he was a blue belt. How you going to be the immortal Iron Fist and have a dude that's already single handedly taken on the Hand routinely show you up? If all Iron Fists sucked as bad as Rand we would have discovered K'un Lun like 5,000 years ago.
The guy who plays Iron Fist is a terrible actor. Horrific even. Alice sucks pretty bad, too. The rest seem to be holding their own, especially Trump Jr.
The script is embarrassing, as is the directing. Even the soundtrack is pretty weak. Have you gotten to that folks song to open up w/ Danny in need of medical attention?
I thought for sure it was this song:
Honestly, I don't know how it went off the rails so badly. For a minute there Netflix was bringing the A game to non movie superhero properties in ways the fucking CW could only dream of. Let's check off the list of what they did wrong:
- Hired a terrible actor to carry their series
- Hired a series of weak supporting cast members outside of David Wenham
- Had a schizophrenic character in Danny who alternately is all about Buddha one minute and then doing something only a crazy bitch ex would after you banged her sister and best friend
- Had a script and overall plot so bizarre and convoluted whatever promise it had was lost in the "what the hell, why" moments in every episode
- Had supporting characters just as schizo as Danny helping him or trying to destroy him in equal measure
- Ended with him failing royally (maybe?)
- The worst sin, which could theoretically make up for everything, the fight scenes weren't even that amazing and most of them featured Danny doing silly ass wushu moves beforehand. I mean it's pretty bad when Davos, your boy and probably a dude that would have been a way better Iron Fist than you says you're the worst ever and no one disagrees.
It seems like they tried really hard to replicate the success of Daredevil by making a conflicted hero but failed miserably because Danny doesn't have any of the moral trappings that Matt does. At the end of the first season of Daredevil you understand Matt's unshakable Catholicism even in the face of some otherwordly shit. After slogging through a season of Iron Fist I'm still not exactly sure what Danny wants, what he plans on doing, what his status is with his kind of girlfriend/traitor, kind of friends/traitors both from his childhood and K'un Lun and why exactly anyone would give a shit about any of them.
It didn't have to be this way either. If they were going to do a series like this, they could have looked no farther than the mythical exploits of real Shaolin monks. They could have highlighted the combination of Zen Bhuddism and martial arts, introduced elements of it to people that likely have no idea what it's all about. They didn't play any of that pacifist shit either, fought in wars and protected people from pirates. There's so much mythology, so many styles and precepts of Zen Bhuddism to work with they could have transposed onto the character that you would expect from a kid steeped in such things since childhood that they could have made the character so, so much better. Yes it would have taken actual work to dive into a culture and mythos most people aren't familiar with but I guarantee it would have ended up better than a shitty Matt Murdock knock off with bad hair and a permascowl.
