Ironheart Episodes 1-3 Review: MCU Show Is Too Much, Too Late

Marvel Studios’ Ironheart is a series fraught with paradoxes. It is the final production of MCU Phase Five, yet it feels like an afterthought. The show feels rushed and incomplete, yet the story moves at a glacial pace. The biggest paradox, however, is the title character, who has been faithfully adapted from the comics in every way comic readers hoped she wouldn’t be.

Ironheart opens with Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) being expelled from MIT. While her professors can ignore her history of setting labs on fire with her prototypes, they won’t ignore her doing her classmates’ homework for a price. She uses this money to finance improvements to her armored suit, a pet project that is all she has to show for four years of college.

Upon returning home to Chicago, Riri is approached by a gang of misfits led by the mysterious Parker (Anthony Ramos). Armed with a cloak he claims is magic, Parker has been targeting the idle rich of Chicago. Riri is ethically ambiguous enough to see no issue with this. However, she quickly discovers that Parker’s promises that she can quit after three jobs are empty. Throw in her accidental creation of an artificial intelligence modeled on her childhood best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross) and her being blackmailed by a black marketer named Joe (Alden Ehrenreich), and Ironheart soon finds herself in over her head.

Ironheart’s Riri Williams is too much like the comics

Strangely enough, Ironheart falls flat because of what Marvel Studios chose to accurately adapt from the comics. Specifically, the abrasive personality of Riri Williams. Popular culture is full of troubled geniuses who are as socially awkward as they are intellectually brilliant. However, these characters are usually given some factor that redeems them, or at least humanizes them. The Riri Williams of the comics didn’t get that in her earliest appearances, and she doesn’t quite get there in these first three episodes. Indeed, one of the grand ironies of the show is that the Natalie AI acts more like a real person than Riri.

The best parts of Ironheart center around Riri trying to make human connections in spite of herself. There is deep irony in that her best relationship is with the AI she’s holding off on deleting because she never came to terms with Natalie’s violent death. The issues and ethics of AI, coupled with Natalie’s existential angst regarding her knowing what she is but still feeling human, make for one of the show’s strongest subplots. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most minor. So is the subplot involving Joe, who develops an odd friendship with Riri despite their blackmailing one another.

Another irony lies in how, for all the exposition this show delivers, there is so much more that goes unexplored. Parker and his gang are incredibly shallow, even by the standards of the heist movies Ironheart imitates. The Hood Parker wears is set up as a mystery to be explored, but virtually nothing more is known by the series’ midpoint. The end result is a story that feels bloated, yet completely underdeveloped at the same time.

Ironheart fails to make Riri a sympathetic antihero

The show’s biggest sin is that, even as an antihero rather than the spiritual heir to Iron Man, Riri is not an engaging protagonist. Her biggest sin is hubris and her inability to consider anything outside of building power armor “because I can.” It is hard to sympathize with her claims that the only thing stopping her from being the next Tony Stark is money. Particularly when she’s able to enhance Joe’s blueprints for various innovations in an afternoon. She could easily make an honest living instead of being the most stupid genius ever, but then we’d have no show. Based on these first three episodes of Ironheart, that may have been for the best.

Grade: 5/10

Ironheart Episodes 1-3 are now streaming on Disney+.