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CRITICAL DRINKER
https://youtu.be/zETqe9tQqOM

VIDEO EXCERPTS: Ironheart has finally been inflicted on the world after gathering dust in the Marvel vault for the better part of 3 years. I can see why they tried so hard to bury this thing.

[...] I can confidently say that this is by far the worst thing Marvel has ever produced in nearly 20 years of MCU history. And damn, man, that's up against some pretty stiff competition by this point. A cringe-inducing calamity of a show drenched in [outdated] identity politics that have aged worse than Mickey Rourke's face.

Weighed down by hammy acting and nonsensical dialogue; a protagonist who's willing to lie, cheat, and steal just to repeat something that's already been done decades ago; a moral compass that changes depending on who it's applied to; and characters so obnoxiously cliched and stereotypical that they feel like a parody of corporate social justice programs.

In short, Ironheart is a creative, logical, and probably financial disaster; and the worst possible thing that could happen to Marvel in a year when it's already staring down the barrel of three high-profile flops.

[...] Riri Williams is a grad student at MIT who's been busted helping other students cheat on their exams, for money. Riri's angry because she wants more resources to make Iron Man tech available to everyone, and become even more famous than Tony Stark. Who apparently only succeeded because he was a billionaire.

What the [__]. You've already been given a free scholarship at the most prestigious university in the entire country, and four years of funding to construct your very own Iron Man suit. And that's still not enough for you? Do you realize how many people would literally kill to be in your position right now? Do you realize how [__]ing ridiculously arrogant and entitled this makes you look?

[...] When Riri rightfully gets expelled for causing massive property damage and subverting the school exam system, she does the logical thing and steals the Iron Man suit that she already built with university funding and takes it for herself.

You know for a show that's all about challenging racial stereotypes, you're really not sending out the message you think you are with this one.

[...] Life is hard when you actually have to work and pay for stuff, isn't it? She's approached by a guy named Parker who offers the chance to join his ethnically and sexually diverse criminal gang ... in return for using her Iron Man suit to help them steal from people.

She'll get all the money and resources she needs. And because stealing and breaking the law is only bad if other people do it, Riri immediately accepts his offer.

[...] Oh yeah, she also hooks up with a black market arms dealer who for some reason is a total [__] that immediately caves in to her demands, gives her everything she wants and acts like a complete [__] for the rest of the show. Here we go again. Oh my goodness, what are the chances that the one and only white guy in this show would turn out to be a completely submissive [__]? This stuff just writes itself doesn't it?

[...] The worst aspects of everything we've come to hate about this MCU franchise: the pandering and heavy-handed racial politics of Falcon and the Winter Soldier; the trite and predictable girl bossing of The Marvels and Wakanda
Forever; the moral flexibility of Black Widow. Here doing horrible things is just fine if you happen to tick the right diversity boxes, and the cringe-inducing attempts at humor of -- well, everything they've done since Endgame...

Ironhereat - hilarious garbage ... https://youtu.be/zETqe9tQqOM

I quit reading at the word "identity politics". We don't need another quippy alt right political diatribe of a harmless Disney miniseries.

(Jun 27, 2025 02:16 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]I quit reading at...

... anything that doesn't affirm your ideology.


Also ignoring all the other bad reviews from a wide variety of sources.

Not everything is about politics. Sometimes a superhero show is just a superhero show.

You'd notice if they injected a lot of right-wing politics.

(Jun 27, 2025 02:16 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]I quit reading at the word "identity politics". We don't need another quippy alt right political diatribe of a harmless Disney miniseries.

There are more episodes to go, so she might drop the aggrieved antihero attitude toward the end and reform or switch from her life of crime. That's certainly a worn trope with respect to some superhero productions. Well -- shows and films of whatever applicable genre -- westerns, film noir, etc? It's been done many times before somewhere, anyway, darn it.

EDIT: Ah, Negan in "The Walking Dead: Dead City". Negan being the ultimate height of wickedness when it comes to a moral turn. And it sounds like the original Ironheart character in the comic books may have had less of a chip on her shoulder from the start (since that debut wasn't crouched in George Floyd era politics).

You mean I'd notice it was political if it were political. Yeah, probably so.

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Let's Call the 'Ironheart' Hate What It Really Is

"Ironheart finally made its Disney+ debut on June 24, 2025. However, hours before the series dropped a single episode, somehow, the Rotten Tomatoes audience rating was in the mid-30s. How can people rate a series they haven't watched? Well, Ironheart was the target of review bombing. A similar situation happened with other female-led projects, such as 2016's Ghostbusters, Captain Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and more. It also seems to happen repeatedly with films and television shows led by women of color, such as The Acolyte or the remakes of The Little Mermaid and Snow White.

These titles are typically the target of year-long hate campaigns, where people who seemingly have no interest in watching them make it their sole mission to keep posting and commenting about them, saying they won't. What could be their reason? They often like to use the phrase "woke" as a criticism, which has no meaning except as a blanket term to cover up racist and sexist beliefs. Multiple comment sections on social media for Ironheart-related posts needed to be shut down due to a flood of racist, sexist, and outright hostile comments. That doesn't seem like a reasonable response to a Disney+ MCU series.

Let's make something clear. There is no "controversy" around Ironheart because saying so legitimizes a clear-cut targeted attack against the series. Fair criticism is understandable, but there is one word behind the review bombing Ironheart saw: racism. Ironheart was review-bombed for no other reason than it features a young Black woman as the lead of a superhero series in the MCU, and some fans can't stand the thought of that.

One look at the comment section of any story about Ironheart reveals that it is filled with people saying things like "another Marvel flop" or "I won't be watching it." People made up their minds about the series before it even aired a frame of footage. Now, no one has to be excited for every Marvel project. Like with comics, you don't need to read or watch every title.

The films and Disney+ series with female leads and people of color have been on the receiving end of review bombing and outright hostility that male-led series were not. There is a reason a sad subset of fans adopted "M-SHE-U" as a criticism, perceiving the addition of women as a bad thing. In titles like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it is always the women of color and the actresses who portray them that are on the receiving end of doxxing and harassment. It isn't subtle.

The review bombing for Ironheart kicked off shortly after the social media reaction embargo for the series was lifted. The general sentiment among fans and critics who had seen it was that the series was, at best, a lot of fun and, at worst, mediocre Disney+ material. There was nothing outright calling it a disaster or a trainwreck, which a loud minority was hoping it would be, so they could use it as ammunition for their belief that "go woke go broke," or stories rooted in a non-cisgender straight white male perspective are inherently "bad writing."

The positive buzz likely triggered a response from people who wanted Ironheart to fail. This led to a review bomb that shaped the narrative around the series, suggesting fans hated it, even though nobody had seen it. This reason should expose the meaninglessness of a particular set of criticisms, but sadly, Ironheart will still be reported and discussed as "divisive" despite the evidence suggesting otherwise. It has an average 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not great, but not terrible by any metric.

MCU: A History of Review Bombing and Its Roots in Misogyny

Review bombing on public access sites is growing more rampant, and the MCU is at the center of it for centering women progressively.

This isn't to say anyone who watched Ironheart and didn't like it is racist. Anyone who watched the series, went into it with an open mind, engaged in good faith, and it wasn't for them, is fine. MovieWeb's own Julian Roman did not like the series, giving it a 1.5 out of 5 rating and calling it one of the MCU's worst (this writer would disagree, as Ironheart clears Secret Invasion and Moon Knight by a wide margin and, on average, is better than the two seasons of Loki).

However, many of the audience responses logged on Rotten Tomatoes for Ironheart seemed to come from people who either never intended to watch it or hate-watched it, knowing they wouldn't enjoy it. Their minds were already made up. Yet it isn't enough to dislike Ironheart; they have to ensure that people who do like it don't get to enjoy it by drowning the discussion in hostile comments and targeted attacks. They want to ensure the series fails so that other fans won't get to enjoy more of it. That is beyond petty; it's cruel, and to take a page from Mister Fantastic actor Pedro Pascal, "loser behavior."

https://movieweb.com/ironheart-racist-review-bomb/

No, I mean you don't seem to notice the injection of obvious left-wing politics... because you agree with it.

And if "2016's Ghostbusters, Captain Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, ... The Acolyte... The Little Mermaid and Snow White" are this authors examples, all of them have been panned by a very wide variety of sources. Basically anyone who wants to retain some credibility with their audience. We've seen this "audience blaming" used repeatedly as a studio tactic to try to preemptively defray criticism what they already know will be a bad production. It happens so often that, at this point, we have to wonder if they only delegate minorities and women to projects they know have bad scripts, just so they can use this excuse.

Quote:We've seen this "audience blaming" used repeatedly as a studio tactic

Except that this article is by Richard Fink a reporter for Movieweb and not by a studio. So taking this view avails him nothing at all. So much for that strawman.

Obviously Riri Williams was never created as a Mary Sue type character, so like many of today's "heroes" in fiction out there (that are anti-heroes), her personal flaws and associations with a "Robin Hood gang" (who keep what they steal) can be set aside.

But still, the two "mainstream" reviews below seem to make it clear that Ironheart suffers from whatever mediocrity or recycled lack of originality that Marvel movies have fallen into in this decade. But this is a TV miniseries, and some of the small screen shows have been better, IMO, than the films. (One ironically expects more from a cable or streaming TV series.) Quite frankly, I never cared much for the movies even back when they were a success, because you can't much develop multiple characters in a two-hour plus span that is also required to be jammed with action sequences.

And from the way it sounds, Chinaka Hodge never intended Ironheart to have much of a positive ending. If the studio really was slow and reluctant about releasing it, then the miniseries having a built-in desire to fade into futility, or not have extended legs, may have had a lot to do with it.

Ironheart Review
https://www.ign.com/articles/ironheart-r...lus-marvel

EXCERPTS: Parker and his gang have each been marginalized by society in some way, but it’s hard to root for their revenge mission against that society – with what little backstory Ironheart gives them, we have no reason to sympathize with their selfishness. Are they really any better than the people they steal from? Series creator Chinaka Hodge's answer seems to be a cynical one that sees Riri not just turn to crime to solve her problems, but to trigger malevolence in others.

[...] There are a lot of daddy issues flying around Ironheart, but Riri's are the only ones with a loving foundation. Through flashbacks, we see the drive-by shooting that killed her mechanic stepfather, Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins), as well as her best friend, Natalie (Lyric Ross). Like many MCU heroes, Riri finds poignant, grief-stricken motivation in her loved ones’ deaths. She wants to protect the people closest to her, but never in Ironheart do we really see her do so. She just uses the suit to commit crimes and fix problems of her own making.

[...] To Ironheart's credit, it does offer a stirring relationship dynamic between Riri and Natalie. ... Alas, by the series' end, Riri is back to her selfish and reckless ways. In an anticlimactic final scene, she’s propositioned by "another magical asshole," and makes an infuriatingly bad decision, one that undoes her entire journey. It's a defeatist ending that makes a cynical argument: No matter what soul-wrenching odyssey they’ve been on, any hero, villain, or average Joe would make a deal with the devil to get what they truly desire.

[...] Verdict. Despite assured, emotive performances from Dominique Thorne, Anthony Ramos, Lyric Ross, and Alden Ehrenreich, Ironheart never gives Riri Williams the transformative hero's journey we've grown to expect for MCU protagonists. Its run-of-the-mill antagonists and cynical script leave few characters to root for, and though its kinetic heist sequences offer some entertainment, the armored battles leave a lot to be desired.
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Robert Ebert review by a Canadian freelancer
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ironh...eview-2025

EXCERPT: Rather than focusing on Riri’s relationships with her city, her family, and the new bonds she’s forming, the show too often attempts to tie Riri to the MCU projects of yore. It becomes less about who she is and more about where she fits in Marvel’s sprawling timeline. It’s a shame that the series seems so intent on burying its lead beneath the rubble of the dying franchise to which she belongs, because Thorne delivers a performance that’s nothing short of revelatory.

Contrast with Dark Winds, the much praised indigenous (Navajo tribe) police drama that AI claims even Critical Drinker gave high marks to. (I can't find this supposed review anywhere, though -- another AI hallucination, perhaps.)

After three seasons, I've come to regard Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee as measurably incompetent because of all the witnesses they have negligently allowed to be murdered in the course of solving or tracking down _X_, and the injuries they acquire for themselves via bumbling unprepared into dangerous situations. But that's a common trademark of many fictional police detectives nowadays.