In the timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, brilliant inventor Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) uses scavenged parts to build an Iron Man-style suit that manages to look just as good and work as well as anything crafted with the full resources of Stark Industries. However the composition of her new standalone series Ironheart is far patchier, a mess of mismatched plots, themes, and action sequences. Showrunner Chinaka Hodge is certainly ambitious in her attempts to weave together very disparate aspects of the MCU to tell a different sort of origin story, but her focus on setting up the future of the franchise makes it hard to tell a good story across the show’s six-episode run.
Riri first appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where she became the center of a conflict between the African nation and the underwater city of Talokan by inventing a way to detect vibranium – the ultra rare metal that powers both societies. In Ironheart, Riri has returned to her studies at MIT, but she hasn’t become any more careful with her inventions. She sells them to other students to get more money to work on her metal suit and causes a lab incident that runs afoul of the dean played by Jim Rash – reprising his role from Captain America: Civil War without any opportunity to actually show off his comedy skills.
Returning home to Chicago – where most of the show was filmed – Riri remains focused on improving her suit and ignoring the trauma of losing her stepfather and her best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross) in a drive-by shooting. The moment is replayed repeatedly in faded tones that give the early episodes a very soapy feeling, more akin to The Arrowverse or Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger than the modern MCU shows.
Convinced that what will really take her suit to the next level is a good A.I., Riri scans her brain and accidentally creates a holographic version of Natalie from her own memories. Tony only created his truly advanced A.I. with the help of the Mind Stone, and Riri is warned that method should have fried her brain. How this worked is never explained, and the writers resist taking the MCU into Black Mirror territory. Instead it manifests as a personal conflict for Riri, who can’t decide whether she should be delighted or horrified to have a new chance to hang out with her dead friend.
Ross brings a contagious exuberance to Natalie as she experiments with her digital form and urges Riri to acknowledge her personhood. A section where she figures out how to text and then repeatedly badgers her friend is particularly funny. But their dynamic is indicative of the show’s biggest problem: Riri isn’t a particularly compelling protagonist. Her primary motivations are fear and ambition, which are an intentional parallel to Tony Stark – especially the panic attacks she has are reminiscent of Tony’s issues in Iron Man 3. Yet Thorne can’t compete with Robert Downey Jr.’s charisma, nor do the scripts tee her up for powerful moments. Riri lacks Tony’s fast-talking swagger or powerful demonstrations of heroism or kindness that could balance her arrogance and the callous way she treats people around her.
Charming up a storm is Anthony Ramos (Twisters) as Parker Robbins aka The Hood, who is out to rob tech executives and wants Riri to join his motley crew of criminals. “Are we Ocean’s 11 or The Sopranos?” Riri asks a little late in the game. The Hood and his schemes feel mysterious and full of potential, but don’t amount to much as he commits nonsensical crimes driven by the most overused motivation in the entire MCU.
At least the heist format provides some novel conflict, with the best being a robbery at a floating greenhouse involving a complicated mix of stealth, fighting, and pyrotechnics. Hodge and the writers are clearly capable of coming up with scenarios that provide plenty of opportunities for an engineer to use her skills to control the environment, like when Riri spins a plan on the fly with the help of her team’s hacker to avoid being squished by a car in an underground tunnel based on The Boring Company’s ambitions.
However, those glimpses make it unforgivable that the show’s biggest brawl takes place in a White Castle, where Riri is jumped while enjoying a meal. If they really wanted this fight to happen at a fast food restaurant to keep this conflict down to earth after the multiple high-tech settings, they could have at least picked something Chicago-based like Portillo’s or Harold’s Chicken Shack, and maybe found some creative uses for the scenery, like having customers taken hostage. The White Castle setting provides nothing but egregious product placement and the conflict is equally uninspired, with Riri outside of her suit handling trained fighters like they’re clowns and then fleeing a truck as if she’d attended not only MIT but the Prometheus School of Running Away from Things.
Despite not being especially nice to anyone, Riri is never at a loss for allies. She gets help from rich suburban tech collector and human doormat Joe McGillicuddy (Alden Ehrenreich) through some painfully awkward banter and a shared love of Alanis Morissette, manifesting in a sing-along that feels like a car commercial. Their dynamic starts as a cutesy version of the grudging alliance between Frank Castle and Micro in The Punisher TV series, though it eventually evolves into one of the most satisfying aspects of the show.
Riri’s other relationships get minimal time to evolve. When she realizes she might need more than technology to deal with the threats she’s facing, Riri easily finds a witch willing to help for nothing in return. (Ironheart sloppily veers into the supernatural, hindered by the MCU’s continued indifference about how magic and witchcraft work, leading to a big twist that doesn’t feel earned.) Riri’s mom Ronnie (Anji White) talks tough but is endlessly supportive. Turning Natalie into an A.I. creates some big conflict with her brother Xavier (Matthew Elam), but he’s also eager to pitch in and help Riri work on her suit to face her problems head-on. Ms. Marvel did a far better job setting up the strong bonds between family, friends, and community that grounded its hero, while Ironheart just uses Chicago and the people around Riri as set dressing or ways to move the plot forward without giving most of them any real agency of their own.
There are reasons for all of this, as Ironheart, like so many MCU shows, is really just meant to be connective tissue between movies. Precious few series have been able to distinguish themselves despite this burden, usually through having a very distinct visual and narrative style like WandaVision or Loki. Hodge is certainly trying to do something different with Ironheart, but every part of it feels clumsy thanks to radical tone shifts, underutilized characters, and bland fights. Riri Williams aspires to build something iconic with her metal suit, but Ironheart never soars like Iron Man did.
The first three episodes of Ironheart premiere on June 24 on Disney Plus. The final three will be released on July 1.
