Iron Cage

So I've started watching Iron Fist and Luke Cage with the idea of finally being caught up enough to watch The Defenders. I'm three episodes into Iron Fist and two into Luke Cage--I've been alternating--and I'm further with Iron Fist because I watched its premiere episode first. I did this because I remembered everyone hated Iron Fist and I like to get unpleasant things out of the way first. But, while it's nowhere near as good as Luke Cage, I am enjoying Iron Fist. The writing is astonishingly bad but it has a kind of momentum to it that keeps me engaged. Luke Cage, though, appropriately enough, really is a love letter to anyone who likes Blaxploitation, and I'm definitely in that category.

A lot of people think the term "exploitation film" means lots of gratuitous sex and violence, that such films exploit the basest human instincts. Exploitation films do have a lot of sex and violence, but not always. What defines an exploitation film is that it takes a hot-button, "ripped from the headlines", topic and exploits it for entertainment. Blaxploitation films exploited the public imagination in reference to racial strife in American cities in the civil rights and early post-civil rights eras. So a film like Coffy or Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song or Across 110th Street spend an improbable amount of time, for crime films, featuring characters discussing the larger significance to the black community of a particular heist or drug deal. Sometimes it can be truly thought provoking, like Mahershala Ali in the second episode of Luke Cage, playing the gangster Cottonmouth, discussing how becoming a ganglord is the appropriate path for a black man seeking to upend racial power dynamics in America.

Head-writer Cheo Hodari Coker undermines Ali's speech by showing two of his thugs going against his orders to kill one of his oldest friends. Is his power an illusion, a pretty veneer over ugly chaos? Luke Cage nicely introduces things for us to think about.

The original comics came out in the '70s and were influenced by Blaxploitation at the time. The TV series wisely follows those films in other ways, including with a really groovy soul soundtrack and lots of sex.

It's kind of silly to think of how people made a big deal about a sex scene in The Eternals when Luke Cage has a topless woman giving a lapdance in the first episode. The sex scene between Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Misty Knight (Simone Missick) is much more sensual and evocative than the scenes between Cage and Jessica Jones, as much as I do like Krysten Ritter. Overall, Colter gives a much better performance on his own series than he did on Jessica Jones. He seems more relaxed and conveys a broader range of emotion. I guess it's not unlike David Boreanaz after he left Buffy the Vampire Slayer to star on Angel.

Iron Fist has been pretty uneven. Sometimes I think Finn Jones is okay as Danny Rand/Iron Fist, sometimes he sounds a little flat, possibly due to trouble with his American accent. It doesn't help that his character seems to change from episode to episode, even scene to scene. In the first episode, he's a cheerful bare-footed wanderer, come to New York on a lark to reclaim is vast inheritance. But the third episode, he's lawyered up--with Carrie Ann Moss's character from Jessica Jones--and is staging angry scenes in restaurants with the Meachums, the siblings who usurped the Rand corporate empire.

Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) is a pretty broad, uninteresting villain so far. David Wenham plays his powerful father, also a villain, and mercilessly chews scenery and seems like he'd be at home in the Adam West Batman series. Danny befriends a kendo instructor called Colleen Wing, my favourite character so far. Though she's another English actress playing an American and her accent tends to sound a little like Elmer Fudd.

The worst parts are whenever Danny flashes back to the mythical monastery and we're treated to fake snow that looks like it belongs in a Christmas department store window.

And yet I am caught up in the story and really do want to see how he finally gets his company back. So they did get me hooked. Still, I'm not sure I could do it if I didn't know The Defenders was at the end of this road.

Iron Fist and Luke Cage are available on Disney+.