Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — Review Thread

This is either a surprisingly earnest review or a well placed troll.

Not even Citizen Kane is better than Venom: Let There Be Carnage



The Mandarin is a lady now.



20 years ago this would have been a Jet Li movie but with DMX in the Awkwafina role.

The reviews definitely have me more excited to see it. Hopefully not to a point of being overhyped. Consensus appears to be that the trailers were bad marketing, with the movie taking many by surprise.

My mother is a Chinese movie nut and has been looking forward to it for some of the actors, so I was going to see it no matter what.

I had a lot of fun. The action choreography is probably the best you'll see in an MCU flick.

That said, the plot changes on a dime quite often during the first few acts then just stays rapid fire until it settles down for the third act. The movie isn't afraid to leave you behind and just jump from new thing to new thing.

A little disappointed that their portrayal of the Ten Rings was "They just do blasty shit," but I guess they didn't want to make them too much like the Infinity Stones.

I think my favorite superhero flick this year is still Suicide Squad, and I might even rank this below Black Widow, but this is a pretty solid flick.

This is their best fight choreography since Winter Soldier. Or Civil War?

Anyways the big CGI spoolge at the end didn't bother me as much as it usually would.

Solid flick.

8/10 on the sliding genre scale.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings(9/9/2021)

As of late Marvel has been adapting some of their less well known characters but I think Shang-Chi is the first title character they’ve brought to screen that I straight-up hadn’t heard of before since Guardians of the Galaxy. He’s a truly obscure character created in 1973 as a blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of Bruce Lee and as far as I can tell had only been used sporadically between the early 80s and his recent resurgence in the run-up to this film. Within the odd niche of Kung Fu themed Marvel characters he was generally overshadowed by another character named Iron Fist, who the MCU kind of squandered their shot at in a bad Netflix show. It does not, however, take a genius to guess why Marvel was so interested in digging this character up: the Chinese market. Everyone knows that there’s billions to be made in The Middle Kingdom and it would be foolish not to seek it out but at the same attempts to cynically pander to that audience have frequently blown up in people’s faces. Anyone remember The Great Wall? That was supposed to unite American and Chinese audiences but mostly just alienated both of them. Then there was the disastrous attempt to put a Chinese character into that Monster Hunter and of course there was also Disney’s own recent debacle with Mulan, which flopped in China despite clearly having been tailored to appease local censors. Audiences there seem to be able to smell out sino-centric pandering and have frequently sent the message to Hollywood that it should stay in its lane instead of trying to compete with their domestic filmmakers, also the nationalists there can be prickly and become offended by unexpected issues (often related to the backgrounds of various actors). In fact it’s still not entirely clear if Shang-Chi will open in that country despite clearly trying to reach out to it. Despite all that, China has a rich culture to mine and even if it’s not going to be the easy stepping stone into a lucrative foreign market that certain studios thing it will there is value in making movies that draw on that country’s mythology and filmmaking legacy just for its own sake and with that in mind I was excited to see what Marvel would do with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

The film begins by establishing a backstory for the film’s villain Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), a Chinese warlord who has lived for centuries using the power of ten rings he keeps on his forearms and can use to do kung fu stuff. Wenwu has also been called The Mandarin at times and it is established here that the bootleg version of The Mandarin we saw in Iron Man 3 was inspired by this true version of the character. Then we move to the present and meet Xu Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), who is living in San Francisco and has been going by the name “Shaun” and has generally been embracing a life of under-achievement alongside a friend named Katy (Awkwafina). Then everything changes for him when he’s attacked by a group of assassins on a bus attempting to steal a pendant he’s wearing on his neck. He fights them back but loses the pendant which forces him to admit to Katy that he has a secret past: he’s the son of Xu Wenwu and was trained to be a martial arts assassin at a young age and with the Ten Rings re-emerges in his life he needs to fly to Macau and find his long lost sister, who has a pendant of her own and may be their next target.

One of the things making Chinese nationalists leery about the film is that the original comic book iteration of Shang-Chi’s origin was that he was an estranged son of Fu Manchu, the racist stock villain from the pulp novels of old. They certainly wanted to avoid that association for both progressive reasons and reasons of copyright so instead they’ve made his father an original character that is a version of The Mandarin, an Iron Man villain from the silver age who also has some problematic aspects. So it was clearly important to them that they make their villain distinct from all that and I think it may have made them rather awkwardly go too far in the other direction because they’ve made Xu Wenwu into what they expect to be an oddly sympathetic figure for a guy who acted as a warlord for centuries before then forming a shadowy assassination league. It’s the kind of approach that is perhaps understandable given that this is a character that’s related to the protagonist and obviously it’s generally good to give your villains shades of grey, but I’m not sure they really pulled it off here. His motives are rather nebulous and a bit removed from his, uh, usual criminal career.

As for Shang-Chi himself… I don’t know, he seems alright. For most of the movie he doesn’t really have superpowers aside from his kung fu skills, making this the second straight Marvel film (the other being Black Widow) to be about a hero who’s basically human, though there is a fairly substantial amount of magical stuff in the surrounding story. As for the action scenes, they’re a bit of a mixed bag. The opening action scene, a fight in the Jackie Chan style between Shang-Chi and some thugs on a moving bus, is awesome and is almost singlehandedly worth the price of admission, but the rest of the movie never really lives up to that first action scene and the film’s finale (which involves CGI dragons fighting each other) is particularly woozy. The film’s overall aesthetic seems to be trying to do for Chinese culture what Black Panther did with African culture, but that seems a lot less special here given that China has a rather long tradition of big budget filmmaking that Africa does not and in many ways this can only really feel like something of diluted and westernized version of the martial arts movies that we’ve seen coming from China for decades and people who know their wuxia and their Jackie Chan will see the reference points this is drawing on.

I should probably disclose that I was in a bit of a grumpy mood when I saw this and that might have affected my take slightly. I think this review is coming off a bit more negative than I mean it to. There are some neat things here, I liked Awkwafina a lot as the sidekick here and even in concept it’s very cool to be seeing Hong Kong legends Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh working in a high profile Hollywood franchise blockbuster like this: paychecks well earned. Still this never really gave me that giddy feeling that MCU films gave off when they’re in top form like they often were leading up to the final Avengers movies. In many ways it feels like they’re putting more of their ambition into their Disney+ TV shows than they are into their movies at the moment while their actual movies are kind of feeling perfunctory. “WandaVision” felt far more adventurous than this and “Loki” felt far more important to the overall MCU story going forward while this just kind of felt like a run of the mill origin story about a character whose origin only moderately interested me. Still I do think that with the origin out of the way Shang-Chi himself may prove far more interesting in future sequels and crossover projects.

*** out of Five

Ever since Avengers: Endgame brought the first decade-plus-spanning story of the MCU to a close, the prevailing question is clearly, "Well...what now?" Disney+ shows like WandaVision and Loki have certainly been a bit bolder creative swings than what we're used to seeing from the MCU -- to rewarding effect -- while Spider-Man: Far From Home and recently Black Widow, their first movies after Endgame, still dealt with or took place within the Infinity Saga and/or its fallout. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings represents the MCU formerly hitting the Refresh button in a way, and I gotta say...it's a very promising start for the MCU's new era.

Coming into it, though, my expectations were a bit tempered because the marketing campaign for this movie was very "meh" at best. Well, turns out that may have been intentional, because a big part of the fun of this movie is discovering for yourself just how cool and fantasy-leaning it ultimately is -- in a good way. Structurally, this movie isn't all that different from your typical sort of superhero origin story, but the real beauty of Shang-Chi lies in its more human aspects and the mythology/world-building. As is the case with nearly all MCU movies, this one picks a certain new-for-the-MCU subgenre and uses that to accentuate the film. In this case, it's a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style epic with cultural fantasy and mythology thrown in and the end result is something that had me surprisingly caught up in the story and characters, rather than simply being entertained on a blanket level.

One of the strengths of the MCU has always been developing its important characters/players well, while one of their consistent weaknesses has been bland villains. This time, it's sort of reversed. Simu Liu's Shang-Chi certainly has charisma and you do come to like him, but the most interesting character here is Tony Leung's villain...who also happens to be Shang-Chi's father. That relationship right there is really the core of the movie, and what keeps things so interesting. Tony Leung's Mandarin is easily able to join the ranks of Thanos, Kilmonger and Loki as one of the MCU's most interesting villains because the movie does a great job of fleshing him out and providing him with ultimately sympathetic motivations for what he's trying to do. For example, his relationship with Shang-Chi's mother is given pretty ample time and development and proves to be a very integral pillar for the film. By the time the film reaches its expectedly effects-heavy climax, the strong characters and emotional arcs really do give the Third Act an added heft rather than just be another Marvel climax off the assembly line with obligatory stakes. And speaking of the action, all those scenes are very energetic and exciting.

It got pretty outlandish at the end there, hey?

At least they didn’t blow up a city.

Wow, this is on Disney+ already.

I'm mostly just replying now so we can get to page 2 and I don't have to scroll past the 7 mile long twitter post that hooligan godzilla posted.