Riri Williams, who suits up as the titular heroine of the new Marvel Cinematic Universe series Ironheart, insists that her plans are much grander than flying around in a suit of armor inspired by Iron Man’s. Her technology, she boasts, will transform the world, and will be, as she says repeatedly, “iconic.”
Ironheart, unfortunately, seems destined to fall well short of iconic status. It’s one of the last vestiges of a version of the MCU that doesn’t really exist anymore, featuring one of the least compelling main characters in any of these shows or movies. While it has some interesting ideas and supporting players, the execution is uneven. And the season ends on a note that’s only satisfying if there are going to be many more Ironheart adventures, when it seems like the character is either going to be consigned to limbo, or at best will be a minor supporting player in some more famous hero’s story.
Let’s rewind. Ironheart was introduced in Marvel Comics in 2016. At a moment when Tony Stark was temporarily dead-ish (it’s complicated, even by comic book standards), two different characters stepped up to take his place. One was Doctor Doom, which is funny now that we know Robert Downey Jr. will be returning to the MCU as Doom. The other was Riri, a teenage engineering prodigy and M.I.T. scholarship student who builds her own armored suit out of parts stolen from the school. For a while, Riri’s suit included an AI operating system modeled on Tony Stark himself, which essentially allowed her to talk with her inspiration while she was fighting bad guys.
In late 2020, Marvel announced an Ironheart series, with Dominique Thorne cast as Riri. Because of the pandemic, multiple Hollywood strikes, and turmoil at Marvel Studios, it’s taken four and a half years for the show to materialize, though Thorne played the character in 2022’s unwieldy Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Now the series arrives at a moment when corporate management has taken a less-is-more approach, trying to limit its output in an attempt to bring back the level of quality control that made the MCU the dominant force in pop culture for over a decade. Ironheart was ordered at a time when Marvel Studios’ President Kevin Feige and company were trying to churn out as much content as possible, no matter how obscure the hero. It only survived this long because — like Wonder Man, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, debuting later this year — the show was in production before their philosophy changed, and presumably because Feige doesn’t want to pull a David Zaslav and just disappear it altogether.
Because Wakanda Forever was released so long ago, and because that movie was so overstuffed that Riri quickly got lost within it, Ironheart creator Chinaka Hodge operates as if this will be viewers’ initial exposure to her. That means that the first episode is a nonstop exposition dump, particularly when it comes to Riri’s tragic backstory, where her best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross) and stepfather Gary were murdered. Her friends and family repeatedly refer to Gary as “your stepfather,” rather than by name, just so the audience will understand who died.
Kicked out of M.I.T. for causing a series of expensive calamities, Riri comes home to Chicago to stay with her mother Ronnie (Anji White), and repair the broken suit of armor she stole from the school on her way out the door. Desperate for cash, she gets mixed up with a group of thieves led by Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), known in the comics as the Hood. He convinces her that they’re just charming rogues who steal from the kinds of people who help maintain a status quo that places roadblocks in front of ambitious poor, non-white people like Riri. For an episode or two, he’s meant to be a small-scale version of Killmonger from the first Black Panther movie: a villain whose point of view often makes him sound more reasonable than the hero. (At one point, Riri asks him if the crew is meant to be more Ocean’s Eleven or The Sopranos.) But as the story evolves, he becomes much more two-dimensionally evil. And his mystical cloak and hood is one of those designs that looks much better on a comic book page than it does in live-action.
There are various storytelling hiccups along the way. One character is abruptly killed offscreen before the show has gotten any real value from casting the actor who plays them. Alden Ehrenreich is a lot of fun as Joe, an instinctively apologetic nerd who reluctantly becomes Riri’s assistant, but he comes and goes from the plot, then abruptly changes personality, then kind of changes back? The action is usually good when it’s kept small-scale — particularly a fight scene where an armor-less Riri has to improvise weapons with the materials on hand at a White Castle — but sequences with the armor at full power are much iffier visually. Perhaps not coincidentally, the suit keeps being trashed and needing to be rebuilt.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Mostly, though, the problem is Riri, and Thorne. It’s not impossible to tell a lively and engaging story about a character consumed by grief — see WandaVision, a.k.a. the best MCU show of all. But as written, and as played by Thorne, Riri is so dour, and so flat, that Ironheart all but grinds to a halt whenever a scene is primarily about the series’ protagonist. It’s a rare miss from a company that’s usually great at casting, even in projects that otherwise don’t work (like Oscar Isaac in Moon Knight). Almost everyone else is more exciting when the focus shifts to them, particularly Natalie (Lyric Ross), who comes back to virtual life as the armor’s new AI. Ross pops off the screen in a way that Thorne unfortunately doesn’t.
The season builds to Riri making a huge choice that only works dramatically if there are meant to be more seasons of Ironheart, or at least if she’s meant to play a significant role in the MCU going forward. Maybe once upon a time, she would have joined Ms. Marvel, Kate Bishop, Billy Maximoff, and other younger heroes introduced on the Disney+ shows for a Young Avengers series or movie. Unless Ironheart — which Marvel seems to be trying to memory-hole before it even debuts(*), releasing all six episodes over a week — is an improbably huge hit, the most Riri can hope for is to pop up in a massive fight scene in one of the upcoming Avengers films.
(*) It’s especially odd that Marvel decided that this, of all shows, would be the one to introduce the MCU version of a significant comics character — unless there are no future plans for that character, just like we should probably never again expect to see Brett Goldstein as Hercules, Harry Styles as Starfox, Kit Harington as Black Knight, or various other heroes teased in the last six years of Marvel projects, then abandoned when corporate priorities changed.
The shame of the bigger picture with all of this is that Feige made a concerted and admirable attempt after Avengers: Endgame to be more inclusive with the characters he featured, after spending years of listening to his then-boss Ike Perlmutter tell him to only focus on white male heroes because they would sell toys. Feige just happened to do this at the confluence of two events: 1.) Endgame felt like the proper conclusion of the whole franchise to much of the non-nerd audience, and thus many of the casual viewers drifted away; and 2.) Disney demanded more MCU projects than Feige could personally oversee, and the consistency that had been a hallmark of the whole endeavor began to quickly vanish. With a few exceptions like the original Black Panther, MCU films had a relatively low ceiling but an extremely high floor; now, the floor is much lower and less predictable.
What this has meant is that a lot of projects either centered on or prominently featuring non-white heroes have been creatively uneven, and have underperformed at the box office or with streaming audiences, which only serves to reinforce the beliefs of the Ike Perlmutters of the world, when this is correlation rather than causation. (Thunderbolts*, a very good MCU movie with a predominantly white cast, also struggled to attract moviegoers earlier this year.) Ironheart and Wonder Man (which I’m rooting for, as a longtime fan of the decidedly C-list Avenger) won’t be the last MCU projects with prominent characters of color — Avengers: Doomsday will feature Shang-Chi, Shuri, and Namor, among others. But they look like the end of Marvel feeling confident that it could place a bet on any property and win big. Ironheart is a gamble that didn’t pay off.
The first three episodes of Ironheart are now streaming on Disney+, with the three remaining episodes releasing on July 1. I’ve seen all six episodes.
From Rolling Stone US
