Review: Marvel's The Defenders

The Defenders was a breath of fresh air for me. I'd actually started to lose faith in the Netflix shows after Iron Fist soured my opinion to the extent that I couldn't bring myself to rewatch Jessica Jones, which I've wanted to do for a while now. Having watched Daredevil season 1 three times now, I've felt like I've neglected the Marvel/Netflix series that I'd actually enjoyed the most. But Defenders was exactly what I needed, a fun little romp through an adventure that brings these large characters together;

And the result is refreshingly greater than the sum of its parts.

Crossovers are always kind of a fickle thing. They can sometimes end up as pandering fanservice or worse, a mismanagement of several pieces of intellectual property. And because of the rather special circumstances that occur to make a crossover event possible, it's usually very short lived.

Defenders, however, is none of these things; It has a compelling narrative with tastefully handled interactions between characters who all have decent amounts of screen time while being only as long as it needs to be, if perhaps maybe even dragging on a bit too long near the end.

I have my gripes, but they're my favourite kind of gripes, little ones. I think I do want to get those out of the way so that I can sing my praises for what I think is actually one of the best shows you can watch on Netflix to date, so without further delay, let me get on with it, and of course, spoilers ahead.

The ending kind of sucked. Not the last episode, the last thirty minutes or so of it. Elektra's motivations don't make a whole lot of sense to me. She's framed as having now rediscovered her affection for Matt, and even murders Alexandra upon being ordered to kill the Daredevil, whom Alexandra can't even bother to learn the name of. It's an endearing moment, and one that really put me on the side of Elektra; she'd overcome her instinct to blindly obey and did something that was... Well, as heroic as Elektra can manage.

But then she proceeds to kind of beat the snot out of Matt but also kind loving him, and proclaiming how she's doing it all for the sake of fucking with Matt. I was under the impression that her motivation was to now procure the dragon remains in order to craft an elixir that would enable her and Matt to live forever. Which is selfish, but in a human kind of way. It just doesn't sit right, and the ending looks like a lot of outtakes splattered together in order to Frankenstein an ending.

Everyone also starts hailing Matt as heroic, when his actions, in the end, were clearly misguided. Matt still thinks he can save Elektra from herself. Matt didn't sacrifice himself for the city; he died trying to save the love of his life, and in the end, probably endangered his team.

Also a neater explanation of how this man survived having a 30 story building dropped on him would be nice. The final shot is of Matt in a church presumably some ways off, but he still technically died in New York. It makes very little sense that he wouldn't end up in a hospital close to the accident. I suppose it's setting up an arch in Daredevil season 3, and that's rumoured to be the acclaimed Born Again story, but I felt even my forgiving suspension of disbelief stretch to its limits.

I hope you like hearing about Kunlun. Because you won't stop hearing about it, and it highlights just how B-grade Iron Fist's mythology is. I don't know if it's the delivery of this word specifically, but it just ends up not sounding right to me. I get that the Kunlun mountains are a real place, but it just doesn't sound like it. It sounds like a fake place with a fake name that I came up with when I wrote bad fanfiction as a twelve-year-old. Maybe that's on me but I cannot be the only one who thinks this.

Finally, god damn, Colleen Wing is sidelined wayyy too often. Everything about Colleen is so well-rounded, from her motivations to her actions, she's human and her jealousy over Danny finding a team to work with is for me a moment to pure for this world. Why the fuck is she not getting top billing? Danny doesn't do any of the notable detective work, Colleen does. Danny doesn't come up with any of the best ideas, Colleen does. Danny can't even motivate himself to stop being such a goddamn downer all the time, Colleen does. She even gets the idea to use the bombs to collapse the building into the tunnel beneath it. Colleen's agency was genuinely refreshing. She's got as much right to be a Defender as everyone else on the team, if not more so. If a blind dude in a bright red costume can be a Defender, a trained swordswoman can too. Colleen Wing is to The Defenders what Stephanie Brown is to the Robins. Part of the club in every sense of the word, always left out of the conversation when we're giving credit.

With all that out of the way, let me gush.

Charlie Cox can make standing still and dramatically flexing his knuckles into a genuinely emotionally impactful scene. I could practically feel Matt's struggle with his inner rage as my own. Matt gets a couple of really hard-hitting emotional beats, and when he talks to the boy he did pro bono work for, explaining life with a disability and where the real strength in overcoming it lies was a heavy scene. Charlie Cox manages to steal the show in all his scenes, and the stunt work during Daredevil's fight scenes are always phenomenal.

Krysten Ritter does Jessica Jones phenomenally. Her cynicism somehow endears her more to me, and you can genuinely see the issues of someone struggling with their identity, not wanting to be a hero, but also being entirely directionless. But my favourite scene was actually watching Jess do her actual job; Being a private investigator. There's an interesting juxtaposition between how each hero does the busy work, the tedious part of the job. Daredevil and Luke usually use fear and intimidation to interrogate, but Matt does sometimes lawyer up to get the job done. But Jess doing the mundane investigation work was just an interesting sight to see. Because Jess is good at her job, make no mistake, but there's just something funny about seeing someone who could punch a man so hard he sees the curvature of the earth digging through public records for information. My favourite part is when Jess shows just how good she is at her job and how freaking insightful she can be, in her own crude way, when she gets Matt to relate to the daughter of the dead architect. I wasn't actually expecting Charlie and Krysten to get as much screen time together as they did, but the two of them knocked it out the park.

Luke Cage gets by far the best introductory scene. "I believe these belong to you" and "And you let them?" are the two best-delivered lines in the whole show, fyt me IRL. Mike somehow has chemistry with whoever he shares a scene with, but his best moments are with Krysten and Finn. Cage and Danny have some bro moments that I just couldn't help but grin wide at. It was endearing and I warmed up to Iron Fist a lot more, and I think that's the biggest strength of the show.

And Danny, Danny, Danny... It took me a while. I eventually warmed up to him. I admit, when Jess punched him the fuck out, I smiled a wide smile. Watching Luke smack Danny around a bit was also just... Deserved. But in the end, I concede; Danny isn't all that bad after all. Danny is the kid of the group, and he's at his best as kind of a lovable goofball. Which is a lot like how he is on the Ultimate Spiderman cartoon, as weird a comparison as that is. Luke humouring Danny's stories about punching out the heart of a dragon was an entirely endearing moment. Yes, Iron Fist is still the weakest character out of all the Defenders, still getting outshined by Colleen. But it was endearing. And Colleen and Danny have some moments of genuine chemistry on screen.

But then again, I ship this. Look at those bedroom eyes. DON'T TELL ME I'M SEEING SOMETHING THAT'S NOT THERE LOOK AT THEM THEY ABOUT TO FRICKLE FRACKLE

Also a quick shout out to Madame Gao's force powers, where were you hiding them, why were they so cool, how come you been holding out on us fam?

Overall, The Defenders really was just.. Fun.

I had fun watching it. I had fun seeing my favourites all interact. This was worth the wait and while eight episodes seem short, it's a bingeable, watchable, fun little adventure and besides an ending that goes on a little too long, Defenders... Was good. Defenders was good.

It's worth your time. It's only eight episodes long. Give it a watch. Have some fun.

If nothing else, you get to see a lot of people punch Finn Jones right in his overly depressive face.

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Iron Fist; What works, and what doesn't

Stop me if you've heard this one before; A rich white guy gets stuck somewhere remote and comes back with scruff on his face and martial arts expertise.

I remember watching Arrow for the first time. It was a breathe of fresh air, this new grittiness. It was grounded. From the first episode, I was in love. Episode after episode, this felt mature. It felt like something unmissable.

It just made it all the more disappointing when after watching the first episode of Iron Fist, I knew I'd just seen all this before, and I've seen it done much better.

This isn't some juvenile Marvel versus DC debate, and while I revel in drunken arguments about which of the two is better, the issue isn't about the respective houses that owns the titans being spoken of here. The issue is simply that Iron Fist has a lot to work with, but somehow comes off as entirely derivative.

In fact, you aren't just getting a shitty version of Arrow here. Episode 2 delivers a scene in a mental hospital that Legion's first episode knocked out of the park.

And after that, a fight with some hatchet wielding henchmen tries to bring the show back to its martial arts roots, but all I could think was that at this point in its runtime, Daredevil had done a continuous take fight scene down a hallway choreographed to perfection that was a feat of cinematographic excellence that comes so rarely it'd be a crime to miss out on it. It was unmissable. Daredevil had already done Rabbit In A Snowstorm, which is probably the best episode of anything ever made, dwarfed perhaps only by Jon Snow's siege upon Ramsay Bolton.

There's another moment where Danny breaks into Joy's apartment and I wanted to be impressed by the clearly CG'd feat of jumping off the tip of a pole onto a second story balcony, but then I remember in Arrow's first season, episode 3, there's a segment where Oli climbs up a wall to dig out a bullet. Stephen Amell doing that physical stuntwork was a beyond entertaining to watch. Danny's balcony scene is... Meh.

And I think that's what Iron Fist comes down to. You've seen it all before, hell, you've seen better in other Netflix series. There's more corporate restructuring and legal banter than any Iron Fisting. As comically laughable as the hatchet henchmen were, at least there was finally some fighting. Iron Fist isn't innovative, or new, but that could have been overlooked if it weren't so damn boring.

The score of Iron Fist isn't anything worth writing home about either. I can't say much about it other than that these cheesy hip hop songs almost make me believe I'm watching something way more interesting than I actually am. There's a bit where a guy murders a whole bunch of people to A-ha's Take On Me and he stops singing just before that falsetto part and I couldn't help but think to myself how if I was a mass murderer singing Take On Me, I'd delay my killing to hit the high notes. At this point I was skim watching, trying to find something to care about.

Finn Jones also has some rather unflattering deliveries. His performance as Loras Tyrell was perfectly passable, hell it was some of my favourite parts of Game Of Thrones, so I'm struggling to understand why his lines come off so awkward. Perhaps it's the accent his forcing, or some bad direction but it just starts to grate after a while.

The thing that works the most against Finn as Danny I think the show makes is just how goddamn interesting Colleen Wing is. She's awesome. I mean, she's stupidly awesome. Every time she's on screen I change my opinion of the entire show. She outshines Danny in every way, despite not having a magic hand that can blow up steel doors and stuff. And when we cut form her scenes, I feel genuine sadness knowing I'm going to have to watch either more corporate dicking about, or Danny trying and failing to woo Joy. Jessica Henwick just gives a stellar performance, and a part of me says fucking fire Iron Fist from the Defenders and add Colleen Wing. If Daredevil can join, so can she, and let's be honest here, this version of Danny's a bit of a wet blanket.

As for the "whitewashing" controversy that followed Iron Fist... Well, that takes a bit of dissecting. Iron Fist isn't as guilty of white-washing as it is of the white savior trope. Danny Reed has always been  a white man. And if you need a strong case for why diversifying white roles can work well and add much needed subtext, remember that The Martian Manhunter's alter ego, John Jones, was white in the silver age, but the now definitive version of his alter ego is a black man.


 And while an Asian American actor could have brought a fresh perspective on the role. I doubt Iron Fist would have much benefited from it, knowing what a snorefest the series is.

Netflix also needs to figure out how to do crossovers. As of yet, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are the only two Defenders to have even met. Hell, CW has three ex-Glee stars in Vancouver at the same time and they'll use that paperthin excuse to have a musical crossover! As interesting and fun as Claire and Jeri are, neither are half as interesting or as fun as seeing main characters interact. Okay, well Claire has some awesome lines. And so does Jeri. They're background characters of other shows and they're both still more interesting than Danny, how?!

Tom Pelphrey does his very best Michael Shannon impression as Ward Meachum, and I don't hate it, but it does make me wish Michael Shannon was actually in the show. Overall, I actually like Tom as Ward a lot. His performance is at least pretty captivating, and if he ever wants to audition for Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire, he most certainly could.

Joy is love interest. I couldn't really find anything interesting to say about her other than that she mostly reacts the appropriate way to a strange homeless man coming into her life and claiming to be her dead childhood friend.

Even the opening sequence is uninspired, and unlike Jessica Jones' cool 1920s detective theme song, or Daredevil's operatic theme over a bust forming from blood, you could swop out the intro sequence of The Last Airbender (I have to much respect for the original Nicktoons show do drag it into this) and nothing would change, it's just a dude waving limbs about for a minute or so!

Overall, there isn't nearly enough martial arts, mystical fisticuffs or even old fashion street brawls to warrant this show a watch. It's derivative and somehow a fresh flavour of crap at the same time. If you ask me, you can give Iron Fist and Iron Miss.

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