"Ironheart" was hastily dumped on Disney+ a few weeks ago, premiering its six episodes over just two weeks. And it in no way deserved this treatment. Created by Chinaka Hodge, the series is about Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the young genius who built her own Iron Man-style armor. She was introduced in "Wakanda Forever" a few years ago as an American university student. However, in the opening scene of "Ironheart," Riri is expelled from MIT after one lab mishap too many, and goes home to Chicago to stay with her mother Ronnie (Anji White).
Riri has sky-high ambitions, but coming from a working class background, she'll need to find her own way forward. In order to make some easy cash, she ends up falling in with Parker Robbins, a charming villain known as the Hood (Anthony Ramos), and his gang of talented criminals. She also makes the acquaintance of an oddball black market arms dealer, Joe (Alden Ehrenreich), and attracts the attention of other sinister forces. It emerges that Riri is still grieving the deaths of her beloved stepfather Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) and her best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross), who were killed in a drive-by shooting. Eric André, Shea Couleé, and Sacha Baron Cohen show up in roles that I will not spoil, except to say that this may be the best use of Sacha Baron Cohen in years.
"Ironheart" is chaotic and juggling too many ideas, but it's also a refreshingly different entry for the MCU. Riri Williams is a genius like Tony Stark, but she's also prone to making terrible choices like Tony Stark, and suffers for those choices. Every time she does something brilliant, she tends to do something equally dunderheaded, like trusting the wrong person or taking the easy way out. Riri could be a hero, but by the end of "Ironheart" she seems just as likely to become a villain, and it's her own fault. I really enjoy Dominique Thorne in the role, who keeps Riri a compelling and sympathetic presence throughout. The creators crucially give her a family life and a history that feel very genuine, and there's an attention to the way she talks and dresses and interacts with others that grounds her in an emphatically African-American milieu before all the genre elements start coming into play.
The supporting cast boasts a deep bench of acting talent. Lyric Ross as Natalie stands out for her bright personality and skill at banter. I also like Anji White as supportive Ronnie and Alden Ehrenreich as the schlubby paranoiac Joe. However, I'm not sold on Anthony Ramos as The Hood. He's very generic and the various pieces of his origin don't quite fit together. I suspect that there were multiple versions of The Hood that ended up all being combined in the end, with poor results. Or it might just be my indifference to Ramos, who I've seen in enough major projects to know that he doesn't work for me in roles like this. Fortunately, he's not the only villain in the show; the others are significantly more effective.
There were clearly a lot of ambitions behind "Ironheart," going by the caliber of the talent involved and the expensive looking production. With such a large cast and so many connections to different parts of the MCU, it feels like a miracle that the show actually coheres as well as it does. It takes a few episodes for the show's different priorities to all get sorted out, but once they do "Ironheart" is actually one of the better MCU shows. I think it helps that while Riri Williams is definitely living in the MCU, she's not on the familiar hero path, at least not yet. Her story is playing more like "Agatha" or "Loki" than "Miss Marvel" right now, and that's exciting.
Unfortunately, it looks like the support for "Ironheart" at Marvel has disappeared, probably due to the current political climate. It's an awful shame, because Riri Williams has a lot of potential, and her show gets a lot of things right that previous MCU series like "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" didn't. I hope that this isn't the last we see of Riri and this group of characters, but I'm grateful that they got a chance at the spotlight in any case.
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