A Husk of An Origin Story: Marvel’s Iron Heart
It’s a great pity that Dominique Thorne is given a tissue of lazy characterisation to play.
Grade: F+
After her introduction in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Marvel’s new miniseries Iron Heart promised to give girl genius Riri Williams, played by Dominique Thorne, her own story as she became Iron Man’s heir. Instead, it’s delivered a husk of an origin story.
The show’s creator Chinaka Hodge has no idea what Riri wants and therefore who she is and who Thorne is supposed to play. During a meeting with her dean at MIT, Riri says she wants “to continue Mr Stark’s work” yet she can’t find any greater praise for Stark other than he “contributed greatly to the field.” That’s a summary written by ChatGPT not how a hero-in-waiting describes their idol who they are on a path to replace as the MCU’s knight in shining, flying and gun-packing high-tech armour. For God’s sake girl, you’re talking about the man who built his Iron Man suit in a cave out of scrap metal, fought aliens and sacrificed himself to save the whole universe. I don’t buy that Riri wants to continue Stark’s legacy. Neither do her dean and her teachers who expel her from MIT for writing other students’ assignments for them. Riri accuses them of wanting her to “be small.” “Riri,” her dean tells her, “that’s a hot pile of garbage.” I agree. Riri’s been given a grant to study at MIT and she’s been given all the facilities she needs to build the Iron Suit she says she wants to build. How has anyone tried to make her small? Why does she even want to build this suit? The line about continuing Stark’s work smells of trash almost as bad as Riri’s whiny quip about being made “small,” so why is she investing her time, brains and money into building her own Iron Suit?
“People are obsessed with them,” she tells her friend Xavier when she returns home to Chicago after being expelled, and, if she can build a better suit, she adds, people will respect her. Who hasn’t given her respect, who’s obsessed with iron suits (we haven’t seen one new suit since Iron Man’s death in Avengers: Endgame six years ago) and is Riri really going to get respect for doing what Stark already did? Aside from looking more gender neutral, more gundam, and having a less hot-rod paint job, Riri’s suit doesn’t have anything Stark’s didn’t. She’s such a gaggle of strawman platitudes that you wonder if she’s using them to cover up her real motives or if Hodge is using them to cover up the fact that she doesn’t know what Riri’s motives are.
It’s a great pity that Thorne is given this tissue of lazy characterisation to play. Thorne is still early in her film-acting career. Apart from Wakanda Forever, she’s only acted in the Flecks’ Freaky Tales, Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, and Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk and none of them in starring roles yet she seems like she’s been acting all her life. She’s got a raw and vibrant spunk in her stride and in her speech and can walk into any room like she owns it. She’s such a pint-sized Michael B. Jordan that you enjoy watching her even though what’s coming out of her character’s mouth is hot garbage.
Riri has no promise of becoming the hero she’s supposed to be. She’s already built her suit when the show starts, so there goes building the suit being a metamorphosis from being a whiny little bitch into a hero, as it was the chrysalis in which Stark changed from an indolent playboy into Iron Man. Nor does she have great villains to rise to defeat as Captain America, Dr Strange or Ant-Man did. The show’s villains seem like rejects from the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtlescartoon show. They’re a band of thieves working out of an abandoned pizza place and have names like Clown and Slug and one struts into heists like they’re on stage at a drag show wearing the full makeup. You don’t fear these ‘villains’. If you can fight back rolling your eyes, you’ll likely just laugh at them.
They, Riri and the majority of the characters you encounter as you watch Riri get tied up with these thieves, don’t promise you that if you keep watching you’ll meet inspiring heroes and terrifying villains. They only promise that you’ll meet one clown after the next accompanied by sanctimonious bullshit. To get parts for her suit, Riri goes to Joe, played by Alden Ehrenreich, who’s a black-market tech supplier yet he’s managed to stay in business without ever touching any of his equipment. He’s afraid of getting his fingerprints on it. Riri lectures him on how he was born with power. Yeah, this weedy, poor man’s Jim Carry is so powerful. Just look at how he lets his neighbour take her dog over to his lawn to shit because she just got her yard done up and her dog won’t poop on the park’s dry grass.
The thieves justify stealing from Chicago’s rich industrialists because they haven’t “been acknowledged for [their] greatness.” I’m sorry, I didn’t get the impression these “washed up criminals” had any greatness that they’d tried to earn acknowledgment for. This justification for what their characters do is so unbelievable and it reeks of Hodge using hip, in-vogue political slogans as compensation for not doing the work of sitting down and thinking up what her characters actually want and why they want it and why we should care.
Ironheart may get better like Daredevil: Born Again did, but Hodge hasn’t given anyone any reason to persist further than the show’s three-episode premiere. If you’re not bored, disappointed, or watching Thorne sympathetically, you’re being lectured. If you want that, I know several Reddit groups for you.