As we continue to weave through these troubled times for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I guess the only people not taking any time off is the people working at the studio itself. With multiple projects a year hitting cinemas and streaming and all of them drawing vastly different reactions both critically and at the box office, the feeling is does the MCU really need another Disney+ show to hit right now?
Well, considering that this solo adventure featuring Iron Man succsessor, Riri Williams has been sitting on and off the shelf since around 2022, need’s got nothing to do with it and as we count down to the phase ending, Avengers double act of Doomsday and Secret Wars, there’s a real sense that the MCU needs to get it’s affairs in order. Still, having Ryan Coogler’s name on it as he rides high from the success of Sinners isn’t going to hurt much. But can Ironheart’s proper entry into the world of superheroes after her introduction in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever held sway the fortunes of a studio in flux?
When we first met Riri Williams, she was in literal deep water with the aquatic beings from Talokan (read: Atlantis) after inadvertently leading surface dwellers to their door after creating a vibranium locating machine. However, after joining the Wakandans in their fight against Namor, we find her back at MIT in a different sort of peril. You see, in her obsessive need to live up to the legacy of Tony Stark, Riri has sworn to try and create another Iron Suit that’s better than his to aid first response workers all across the country, but when you’re not a billionaire, building state of the art robo-suits some with a hefty price tag. After being caught letting other students plagiarise her work for money, MIT show the talented inventor the door, so she promptly takes back the suit she’s been building and blasts back to Chicago to face the music from her mother.
However, as she reintegrates herself back into her old neighbourhood, she finds that the traumatic memories of the drive by shooting of her best friend Natalie and her stepdad Gary still haunt her and her cash flow problems still mean that her hope of matching Stark remains merely a pipe dream.
Enter Parker Robbins, a small time gang leader also known as “The Hood” who recruits Riri with the aim to use her expertise to pull off a string of audacious heists. However, despite the fact she’d be taking dirty money (and the fact that her audition was to escape a boobytrapped elevator full of poison gas), so desperate is she to accomplish her goal, she takes the money and gets to work equipping her suit with new A.I. mapped from her own brain. However, after falling asleep during the lengthy process, she awakes to find that the artificial intelligence has plucked something rather alarming from her subconscious.
Say what you will about the highs and the lows of the MCU streaming shows, but at least they usually know how to grab your attention right from the word go. From dancing round the fertile imagination of a superpowered fangirl in Ms. Marvel, to exploring the world of multidimensional bureaucracy in Loki, they’ve usually nailed their tone cold within the opening few minutes of the first episode. However, oddly enough for a character looking to put her stamp on the world, Ironheart season opener seems to struggle with doing the exact same thing. All the connective tissue is all there – from a cameo from Jim Rash reprising his quirky MIT guy from Captain America: Civil War to plenty of references to the dear departed Tony Stark – but somehow it all feel tenuous at best. There’s no real mention of Riri’s adventures during Black Panther which gave her not one, but two suits to play with (which she promptly lost) and her devotion to the memory of Stark seems to lack conviction as it solely seems to be based on her being accepted to his program and nothing to do with meeting the man himself. Failing that, Ironheart also has noticable system failures when it comes to other aspects of it’s story that have already been done before (and better) in other Marvel properties. While the immersion into a black neighbourhood is as genuine as you’d expect with Ryan Coogler on producing duties, it ends up being a pale imitation of what Netflix’s Luke Cage show had already pulled off and none of Riri’s supporting cast have the room to make that much of an impact.
Elsewhere, we find her flirting with the idea of joining the Hood’s criminal enterprise, but the introduction of his streetwise, quirky gang and their respective heists again feels like a lesser version of Scott Lang’s goofy cronies in the first two Ant-Man movies (what can I say, Michael Peña and David Dastmalchian goes a long way).
Also failing to make an impact during these early days is Anthony Ramos’ Parker Robbins, which is something of a shame considering both Ironheart and the Hood are both characters created by comic writer Brian Michael Bendis and the fact they’re both turning up in the same show is something of a nice little tribute (if you were to throw Jessica Jones in there too, you’d have quite the hat trick). But beyond all the foreshadowing involving mystical looking tattoos adorning his back and weird, supernatural whispers that accompany his creepy looking cape, Ramos, like everyone, is going to have to wait his turn before he can truly cut loose.
However, despite disappointingly starting things in second gear, there’s still a number of plus points about Ironheart to cling to with the first being Dominique Thorne herself. Building upon her Black Panther debut, it’s something of a relief to have another flawed female character in the MCU aside from the weirdly flawless and slightly samey badasses we kept getting there for a while – but while the sub-plot of her unresolved trauma over her dead friend may pale compared to the mental health issues brought up in Thunderbolts* earlier in the year, that doesn’t stop the actress holding court as she skillfully steers her character around the fact that she regularly breaks the rules and the law.
Also pretty cool to see is the belated return to the MCU of big-ass, clunky, Iron Man suits that don’t magically trickle up the body with nano-tech. In fact, the opening sequence that sees Riri suit up in her satisfyingly bulking armour much in the same way Tony Stark did with his remote suit in Iron Man 3 may be the coolest armour related MCU stuff in bloody ages – it’s certainly better than the overly CGI looking Mark II armour she weirded in her previous appearance. Finally, I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t bring up the magnificent title drop that sees Riri’s crashed suit tear up the concrete to form her name – comic book perfection.
However, it seems that Ironheart has chosen to fly out of the hanger at only half throttle, which is a weird choice considering how much the MCU desperately needs a win right now. Still, we’ve still got five whole episodes to go, so there’s plenty of time for Marvel’s latest hero to pick up the pace – let’s just hope she’s got enough juice for the journey.
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