The obvious setup of the thwarted daughter, the never-heir, finally getting to have her say doesn’t just end there it becomes a way of exploring an entire maternal legacy akin to its own equally powerful way of being and fighting. Part of the fun of Shang-Chi is that it goes through these motions with an actual sense of interest in them. Things are not allowed to remain that way, of course. Xialing, meanwhile, runs a fighting ring in Macau. When we meet adult Shaun, he’s a hotel valet in San Fran pretending to be a normal guy, working alongside his girlfriend, Katy (Awkwafina), and contentedly failing to make anything of himself. And the kids that the couple had in the meantime, Shang-Chi (Shaun, to friends) and Xialing, have grown into masterful warriors in their own right - the young man because his father saw him as the direct heir to the Ten Rings, the young woman because her father’s lack of interest became, in a skewed way, an opportunity to train herself. Wenwu, who’d set aside his Ten Rings for love - which entails becoming mortal - has been given good reason to traipse back over to the dark side. And, in one of the movie’s most pleasurable scenes - a leaf-strewn bit of pleasing wuxia fighting intercut with “ I think I’m in love with this woman ” close-ups - he gets his ass handed to him for the first time in centuries.įast-forward to the present. Then he sets out to find Ta Lo, the last frontier for a man who has everything. In the other corner: their father, Xu Wenwu (Leung), a centuries-old warrior who, empowered by a mythical set of bangles known as the Ten Rings, has been able to hoard money and power, fucking around with governments, building his own army and the like, for years and years. In one corner, there’s their mother, Ying Li (Fala Chen), guardian of the hidden village Ta Lo, which, buried in deep in a forest, happens to be all that stands between humanity and its imminent destruction. Suffice it to say he and his sister, Xu Xialing (Zhang), descend from a legacy of power and myth. It’s probably best to leave the intricacies of the life of Xu Shang-Chi (Liu) to the movie. The rest - a forest maze that collapses in on people, dragons, souls getting sucked out of bodies, roles for women that are more than the standard gender-flipping lip-service - is a cherry on top. It’s got a plausibly fearsome villain by way of Leung, a nice ensemble of heroic personalities (played by Simu Liu, Meng’er Zhang, Yeoh - even Awkwafina gets in a good kill when it counts), and a dose of actually-poignant family drama undergirding all the rest. And it accomplishes all of this efficiently and effectively enough that we indeed spend most of our time watching people duke it out on the sides of skyscrapers, in underground fighting rings, on San Francisco public transit, and elsewhere. The success of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which was directed by indie filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12 ), is that it manages to do everything expected of it: set up a new and, for many, not terribly familiar (or, because of dated stereotypes, not always fondly remembered) superhero break free of those aforementioned stereotypes by giving the cultural legacies at its center a little weight satisfy audiences so used to the usual hero-journey theatrics of origin stories that phoning it in with “the usual” just won’t cut it anymore. Inevitably, someone wants to unleash great evil upon the world, and someone else wakes up one day to realize that it’s his fate, responsibility, and chore to be the guy who stops the other guy. (Frodo just had the one, and it was enough of a pain in the ass.) The promise of Shang-Chi, which is as much martial-arts movie as it is standard superhero origin fare, is that a lot of people will get their asses kicked: sometimes gracefully, even beautifully, and other times with the battering-ram power you can expect of a movie advertising 10 rings at play. Put the likes of Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung in a movie, on the other hand, and attach it to a kung-fu superhero, and my needs adjust accordingly. be a wise-ass for two hours if he has to do it from behind a mask for a few scenes, so be it. I do actually go to an Iron Man movie wanting to see Robert Downey Jr. This is saying a lot for a movie that does have a hefty dose of backstory to plow through, being a cross-generational, culture-forward origin story and family drama - a narrative with heavy lifts on the exposition front and a heap of traps to avoid on the cultural front.īut this is also as it should be. Someone will have to do the actual math (and I don’t doubt that someone will), but if Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t the most action-oriented movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far - purely in terms of ratio of time spent watching people beat each other up to time spent vamping in the interim - it has to rank somewhere near the top.
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