Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Year: 2021
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Starring: Awkwafina, Tony Leung, Simu Liu & Meng'er Zhang
Runtime: 132 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 15/09/21
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Starring: Awkwafina, Tony Leung, Simu Liu & Meng'er Zhang
Runtime: 132 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 15/09/21
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings officially marks the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four films. Whilst Black Widow is definitely part of that roster, its existence as a prequel set at the start of Phase Three means that Shang-Chi is the first MCU film to progress the story from where Spider-Man: Far From Home left us two years ago. If you’ve been keeping up with the Disney+ MCU series so far then you’ll know that Phase Four is set to be all about the Multi-Verse with the more magical elements from properties like Doctor Strange becoming more central to the story. Shang-Chi is then our first real glimpse at what is to come.
Thousands of years ago Xu Wnewu (Tony Leung) discovers ten mystical rings that grant their wearer extraordinary strength and immortality. With the rings, Wenwu establishes the army of the Ten Rings. In the 1990’s Wenwu goes in search of Ta Lo, a village hidden away from the rest of the world. On the way he meets Ying Li (Fala Chen), a guardian of the village, and they fall in love. They both sacrifice their mystical powers for a normal life together and have two children.
Jump forward to the present day, Shaun (Simu Liu) is a valet driver as a San Francisco hotel and he likes to get drunk and perform karaoke with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina); but when he is attacked by unknown assailants who steal a pendant his mother gave him, Shaun reveals to Katy that his real name is Shang-Chi and as a child he was raised to be a warrior of the Ten Rings by his father, Xu Wenwu, and that his sister, Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) is likely to be attacked next.
When Xu Xialing’s pendant is also stolen, it is revealed that Xu Wenwu needs them to reveal the location of Ta Lo, where he believes Ying Li is waiting for him despite her death several years prior.
Thousands of years ago Xu Wnewu (Tony Leung) discovers ten mystical rings that grant their wearer extraordinary strength and immortality. With the rings, Wenwu establishes the army of the Ten Rings. In the 1990’s Wenwu goes in search of Ta Lo, a village hidden away from the rest of the world. On the way he meets Ying Li (Fala Chen), a guardian of the village, and they fall in love. They both sacrifice their mystical powers for a normal life together and have two children.
Jump forward to the present day, Shaun (Simu Liu) is a valet driver as a San Francisco hotel and he likes to get drunk and perform karaoke with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina); but when he is attacked by unknown assailants who steal a pendant his mother gave him, Shaun reveals to Katy that his real name is Shang-Chi and as a child he was raised to be a warrior of the Ten Rings by his father, Xu Wenwu, and that his sister, Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) is likely to be attacked next.
When Xu Xialing’s pendant is also stolen, it is revealed that Xu Wenwu needs them to reveal the location of Ta Lo, where he believes Ying Li is waiting for him despite her death several years prior.
I really did not enjoy Shang-Chi, and it disappoints me to say that because it honestly is great seeing the MCU branch out into martial arts movies and explore East Asian culture, but I really struggled to enjoy almost anything about the film.
I did really like the fight choreography. The majority of the film’s combat sequences are martial arts based, and director Destin Daniel Cretton definitely knows how to make them engaging; in particular the sequences where a young Shaun is training to be a member of the Ten Rings, and a scene that takes place on some scaffolding are highlights of the excellent combat Shang-Chi has to offer.
The epic finale however throws this awesome fight choreography out of the window in favour of two random dragons fighting. Why they were there, I’m not really sure. Maybe I missed a key line of dialogue somewhere, but the final battle of this film felt more like it belonged in the Godzilla franchise than it did in this film martial arts film. This battle also went on far too long, like a good twenty minutes could have been cut from it and it still would have been a long battle. It just felt like the writers didn’t really know how to end it so they just pulled out two giant monsters to fight each other whilst the characters we have spent all film with just kind of exist in the same space as this battle.
I also really loved Xu Wenwu as a character, and the story concerning the family he built and how it was destroyed. Leung delivers a great performance as well, and he was by far my favourite actor in the film. He will definitely be in the line-up of best MCU villains alongside the likes of Thanos, Loki, and Killmonger. What I enjoyed even more about this story was how it tied into The Mandarin from Iron Man 3, who comic book fans always cried out was a major misuse of the character.
Unfortunately, despite Leung’s excellent performance and interesting character, I found everyone else either forgettable or irritating. Shaun, I found generally boring, and whilst Simu Liu does deliver a good performance, the character of Chang Chi just wasn’t interesting to me in this film…which is a major problem when he is the main character. Xu Xialing was a good character but she wasn’t in the film enough to get the best out of her, the post-credits sequence centred on her sets up an interesting future for the character that I am personally looking forward to a lot, but it’s a shame that in the film she felt like she was always being pushed to the side-lines in favour of her less interesting brother.
I don’t even want to get into all the reasons I don’t like Katy but a lot of it stems from the fact that I don’t really find Awkwafina funny or a good actress and unfortunately, she’s just being the same goofy comic relief character she is in everything else so yeah…that sucked for me but if you like Awkwafina then I’m sure you’ll have a good time with Shang-Chi.
In fact, talking about how I don’t find Awkwafina funny, Shang-Chi goes in hard for the cheesy comedy in the same way Ant-Man did but I found it never landed. The cinema I was watching in was usually deafeningly silent after jokes were told, or you’d hear a few groans because of how much they sounded like dad jokes. There were definitely some that landed, but the vast majority didn’t, and the film unfortunately doubles down on this bad comedy.
I did really like the fight choreography. The majority of the film’s combat sequences are martial arts based, and director Destin Daniel Cretton definitely knows how to make them engaging; in particular the sequences where a young Shaun is training to be a member of the Ten Rings, and a scene that takes place on some scaffolding are highlights of the excellent combat Shang-Chi has to offer.
The epic finale however throws this awesome fight choreography out of the window in favour of two random dragons fighting. Why they were there, I’m not really sure. Maybe I missed a key line of dialogue somewhere, but the final battle of this film felt more like it belonged in the Godzilla franchise than it did in this film martial arts film. This battle also went on far too long, like a good twenty minutes could have been cut from it and it still would have been a long battle. It just felt like the writers didn’t really know how to end it so they just pulled out two giant monsters to fight each other whilst the characters we have spent all film with just kind of exist in the same space as this battle.
I also really loved Xu Wenwu as a character, and the story concerning the family he built and how it was destroyed. Leung delivers a great performance as well, and he was by far my favourite actor in the film. He will definitely be in the line-up of best MCU villains alongside the likes of Thanos, Loki, and Killmonger. What I enjoyed even more about this story was how it tied into The Mandarin from Iron Man 3, who comic book fans always cried out was a major misuse of the character.
Unfortunately, despite Leung’s excellent performance and interesting character, I found everyone else either forgettable or irritating. Shaun, I found generally boring, and whilst Simu Liu does deliver a good performance, the character of Chang Chi just wasn’t interesting to me in this film…which is a major problem when he is the main character. Xu Xialing was a good character but she wasn’t in the film enough to get the best out of her, the post-credits sequence centred on her sets up an interesting future for the character that I am personally looking forward to a lot, but it’s a shame that in the film she felt like she was always being pushed to the side-lines in favour of her less interesting brother.
I don’t even want to get into all the reasons I don’t like Katy but a lot of it stems from the fact that I don’t really find Awkwafina funny or a good actress and unfortunately, she’s just being the same goofy comic relief character she is in everything else so yeah…that sucked for me but if you like Awkwafina then I’m sure you’ll have a good time with Shang-Chi.
In fact, talking about how I don’t find Awkwafina funny, Shang-Chi goes in hard for the cheesy comedy in the same way Ant-Man did but I found it never landed. The cinema I was watching in was usually deafeningly silent after jokes were told, or you’d hear a few groans because of how much they sounded like dad jokes. There were definitely some that landed, but the vast majority didn’t, and the film unfortunately doubles down on this bad comedy.
I feel like I need to address the ‘Mary Sue’ nature of Shang-Chi too. For those unfamiliar the term Mary Sue means a character, usually female, who is just naturally great at everything. This problem is present for both Shaun and Katy in different ways. Whilst Shaun has undergone years of combat training, his Mary Sue moment comes right at the end of the film when he gets the Ten Rings during the final battle. He manages to use them as though he’s been using them for years, pulling off some insane moves that his father never did, as well as using them to basically fly. None of what he uses the rings for has been shown in the film before, and it makes him out to be so much more powerful than his father who had been wielding the rings for thousands of years.
Katy meanwhile is just straight up Mary Sue all over. She’s a great driver which is established early on, fine, makes sense, she’s a driver for a living. But once she starts getting brought into fight sequences, she starts kicking all kinds of ass without ever having been in a fight before. She even has Katniss Everdeen levels of skill with a bow and arrow but has literally never held one before until she manages to land bullseye after bullseye without even trying.
I also need a moment to talk about the bad CGI. We’re now twenty-five films deep in the MCU and we’ve seen some incredible CGI work on these films in the past. Why then does Shang-Chi have the worst CGI of them all? It was horrible! It looked worse than films from the early 2000’s. An early scene involving a bus shooting down the San Francisco hills at high speed had me covering my eyes and gritting my teeth because it looked so awful and as though it had been pulled from a PS2 game. How has this happened? Were the special effects on this film ever finished?
There’s another CGI effect of some leaves being whirled around during a combat sequence and a similar trick was done in 2004’s House of Flying Daggers and it looked ten times better in that film and it’s almost twenty years older!
Personally Shang-Chi was a major missed opportunity for Marvel to do something interesting and different in the MCU. Having mulled on it for a few days I don’t hate it as much as I said I did when the credits started rolling (claiming it was the worst MCU film since Thor: The Dark World), but it’s definitely low down in my rankings of MCU films, coming in alongside films like Ant-Man and the Wasp and Black Widow.
The plot of the film is forgettable and largely uninteresting, but the excellent villain and familial ties he has to our hero definitely make the film more interesting in that sense.
The combat sequences are excellent, even if the final battle is far too long. Plus I’m looking forward to seeing where Xu Xialing goes from here, and the other post-credits sequence surrounding the Ten Rings and the role they will play in the MCU going forward was definitely exciting.
It’s a below average MCU film that has potential for greatness, but is squandered by lacklustre writing, bad CGI, and a bloated runtime.
Katy meanwhile is just straight up Mary Sue all over. She’s a great driver which is established early on, fine, makes sense, she’s a driver for a living. But once she starts getting brought into fight sequences, she starts kicking all kinds of ass without ever having been in a fight before. She even has Katniss Everdeen levels of skill with a bow and arrow but has literally never held one before until she manages to land bullseye after bullseye without even trying.
I also need a moment to talk about the bad CGI. We’re now twenty-five films deep in the MCU and we’ve seen some incredible CGI work on these films in the past. Why then does Shang-Chi have the worst CGI of them all? It was horrible! It looked worse than films from the early 2000’s. An early scene involving a bus shooting down the San Francisco hills at high speed had me covering my eyes and gritting my teeth because it looked so awful and as though it had been pulled from a PS2 game. How has this happened? Were the special effects on this film ever finished?
There’s another CGI effect of some leaves being whirled around during a combat sequence and a similar trick was done in 2004’s House of Flying Daggers and it looked ten times better in that film and it’s almost twenty years older!
Personally Shang-Chi was a major missed opportunity for Marvel to do something interesting and different in the MCU. Having mulled on it for a few days I don’t hate it as much as I said I did when the credits started rolling (claiming it was the worst MCU film since Thor: The Dark World), but it’s definitely low down in my rankings of MCU films, coming in alongside films like Ant-Man and the Wasp and Black Widow.
The plot of the film is forgettable and largely uninteresting, but the excellent villain and familial ties he has to our hero definitely make the film more interesting in that sense.
The combat sequences are excellent, even if the final battle is far too long. Plus I’m looking forward to seeing where Xu Xialing goes from here, and the other post-credits sequence surrounding the Ten Rings and the role they will play in the MCU going forward was definitely exciting.
It’s a below average MCU film that has potential for greatness, but is squandered by lacklustre writing, bad CGI, and a bloated runtime.