Divalicious Review! Scrapheap Marvel Ironheart At Least Has Heart in Dominique Thorne
By Caroline Cao | June 24, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
What else for a tech prodigy Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) to do but to slip into a Breaking Bad (in executive producer Sev Ohanian’s words) arc in the six-episode Ironheart miniseries? Her educative Wakanda “internship” in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hasn’t immunized her against personal failings.
When MIT expels her for selling her machines to cheating students, Riri returns home disgraced and in search of funds to maintain her tech suit that rivals that of the late Tony Stark. She reasons that if Stark was born and blessed with his billions for his project, why can’t she have those resources at her disposal?
There are human dimensions of Riri that, I suspect, the unsavory, anti-Black megaphones of the Internet would target. Riri is a messy girl herself and is prone to poor impulses that give minimal thought to her follies until it’s too late. She’s good-spirited, but has too many blinders on to see how it’s affecting her loved ones and digging herself deeper in scrapes. Thorne is exactly charming enough to convey that she’s simply trying to assert her independence and distract herself from terrible memories.
Riri has baggage in the form of PTSD flashbacks of the drive-by shooting that killed her beloved stepfather and best friend, Natalie (Lyric Ross). In need of sustainable funds to maintain her iron suit, she falls in with shady youth crowd, one led by Parker Williams (Anthony Ramos, well cast wit charm, but otherwise doesn’t convey the required range) in a mysterious cloak with his merry band of checkered-past delinquents played by spotlight-hoggers like Rupal’s Drag Race alum Couleé (wolfing down their scenes with diva flair), Zoe Terakes, Shakira Barrera, Sonia Denis, and Eric André (Andre here feels criminally underused).
When Parker commissions Riri’s technological service for heists with grand windfalls, Riri accidentally creates an AI manifestation of her PTSD guilt in the hologram of Natalie. Her interactions with said holo of her dead best friend—a ghost of Riri’s own making—is the series’ emotional anchor, held together by the charms of Ross’s banter with Throne. Most of Ironheart feels like perfunctory material.
Ironheart has a promising team behind it, including producer Ryan Coogler, which made me wish better for Ironheart. At times, Ironheart breaks into distinctive styles in flashes, such as the clever title drop graphic of each episode or the montages of times together. Still, the series overall could benefit from the kind of distinction that invigorated Ms. Marvel. I also suspect Ironheart would have been better calibrated as a feature film than a six-episode series.
Scenes where Riri connects with Natalie, her mother, Ronnie (played by sharp Anji White), and her community are the strongest parts of the series. But at its worst, Ironheart is executed like a cobbled-together scrapheap of promising Marvel concepts and villain-hero introductions. Even when conflicting storylines and character reveals begin to intersect and overlap, they sag like stones to Riri’s story. It’s a little upsetting when I feel that Alden Ehrenreich, who plays Riri’s black market contact Joe with a balance of disconcerting and comedy, had more psychological material to chew on than Ramos.
Ironheart has a beating heart in Throne, but she deserves richer iron than the show gives her.
Photo image: Disney
