This review contains mild spoilers for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Seven months after it was originally planned, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has finally arrived in theaters. Set in a post-Endgame world, it sees a master martial artist in hiding being drawn back home to confront his father, the real Mandarin and the true leader of the Ten Rings terrorist organization. Through all the family drama, exposition-filled flashbacks, and MCU worldbuilding, director Destin Daniel Cretton never loses sight of the most important element of superhero movies: fun.
The script – credited to Dave Callaham, Andrew Lanham, and Cretton – does little to shake up the familiar Marvel movie formula, but it has more than enough laugh-out-loud gags, kinetic martial arts fight scenes, and breathtaking fantasy visuals to make up for it. Shang-Chi is one of the most deliriously entertaining moviegoing experiences in recent memory, and a treat for action comedy fans.
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Marvel’s casting guru Sarah Finn has nailed it once again. With the perfect combination of humor, pathos, and leading-man charisma, Simu Liu will make a more than welcome addition to the Avengers line-up. Any MCU star needs the comic timing to pull off quippy one-liners and the dramatic nuance to convincingly grieve a parent or doubt their own abilities, but Liu’s performance goes a step further than a standard superhero turn. The jarring tonal shifts between comedic moments and dramatic moments can often feel disingenuous in Marvel movies, as the character instantly switches between cracking jokes and feeling morose, but Liu figures out these tonal shifts organically.
Shang-Chi’s story reuses a lot of the same character conflicts seen in other MCU movies: daddy issues, dead mom, a “chosen one” figure suffering from impostor syndrome. However, the extensive flashbacks filling in his family history help to break up the formulaic plot, and the fast-paced plotting keeps the story moving forward from scene to scene, never sticking around in one location long enough to become dull. There’s a slight lull in the second act with a relentless barrage of exposition over dinner, but a jaunt through a moving forest into a hidden fantasyland sees to that.
A lot of Marvel movies – and the recent Disney Plus series – have totally unengaging fight scenes. The actual action becomes incomprehensible in a dizzying frenzy of cuts between actors and their stunt doubles. Thanks to Cretton’s sparing use of cuts and his immensely skilled stunt team’s unparalleled physicality, Shang-Chi has some of the greatest fight scenes in the MCU. Many of the movie’s fight sequences are captured in long takes, so the audience can absorb every punch, kick, and Ten Rings-powered smackdown. They all have a unique twist, too, like taking place on a moving bus or on several floors of scaffolding on the side of a skyscraper. The latter gives the martial artists plenty of metal bars to swing around on, as well as raising the stakes with the threat of a 500-foot fall into a crowded street.
Shang-Chi aims to rectify one of the MCU’s most controversial twists. After Iron Man 3’s trailers teased the Mandarin as the big bad who would bring down Tony Stark, he was revealed to be a beer-swilling, soccer-loving actor hired by Aldrich Killian to act as the face of his terrorist organization. This twist understandably irritated fans of the comics who knew the Mandarin as Tony’s arch nemesis and one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel universe.
The main villain in Shang-Chi is the real Mandarin, who actually hates the moniker “Mandarin” and goes by his real name, Wenwu. Tony Leung, the star of such classic Hong Kong action movies as Hard Boiled and Infernal Affairs, makes up for the disappointment of Iron Man 3 with a suitably sinister turn as a ruthless, narrowminded warrior who would allow the universe to be destroyed if there’s a chance it’ll bring back his wife. Evil dads are plenty familiar to MCU fans after Ego and, of course, Thanos, but Wenwu’s determination to resurrect his wife makes him subversively sympathetic.
One of the biggest surprises in Shang-Chi is the return of Trevor Slattery. Introduced as a prisoner of Wenwu’s, Slattery is quickly sprung from his cell and joins the heroes on their journey. Ben Kingsley was hilarious in Iron Man 3, but the enjoyment of his performance was offset by the disappointment of the fake-out. In Shang-Chi, he’s just as hilarious without any of the disappointment. The prevailing fan theory was that Shang-Chi would open with the real Mandarin executing Slattery to establish his power, but giving Kingsley a supporting role as a comedic foil was a great way to redeem this polarizing character.
As great as Liu, Leung, and Kingsley are – not to mention scene-stealing supporting player Michelle Yeoh – the true breakout star of Shang-Chi is Awkwafina as the titular hero’s best friend, Katy. It’s refreshing to see an MCU movie’s female lead who’s just a close platonic friend of the hero instead of forcing a perfunctory romantic subplot. Katy is the movie’s audience surrogate as an everywoman among magic-wielding martial artists, and Awkwafina’s typically deadpan line deliveries make her a perfect fit for that role.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may be restrained by the same plot formula that usually holds back MCU origin movies, but its action sequences are endlessly compelling, Liu and Awkwafina’s electric chemistry creates a bunch of hysterical moments, and it packs more than a few surprises.
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