The MCU has a lot of fight scenes – that’s kind of its thing. Regardless of the layered themes and complex moral core at the heart of many modern Marvel flicks, they all end with a good guy punching a bad guy until one of them wins. There’s nothing especially wrong with this – they are comic book movies, and that’s how superhero comics tend to end. Plus, they’re clearly incredibly popular, so they’re obviously doing something right. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, however, recently managed to elevate these predictable scenes into something fresh.
Shang-Chi is no exception to the MCU’s usual rules. It’s an origin story that starts in the middle, brings in characters and references from elsewhere in the series, and ends with CGI fisticuffs between the hero and a villain with strong ties to him and a similar fighting style. It's good, and if you can connect with its more relaxed and comedic tones, it's great. It has had a strong start at the box office and looks set to continue as another Marvel megahit – go woke, go make a load of money because no one cares about the YouTube culture war. But as great as it is, it's certainly a Marvel movie, with all of the typical tropes that identity brings. The one exception is the scene on the bus, which breathes fresh life into MCU fight scenes.
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While the movies always end with the big explosive VFX showdowns – see Iron Man, The First Avenger, Black Panther, WandaVision, The Incredible Hulk, Ant-Man, Age of Ultron, Infinity War, Endgame… you know the drill – Marvel fights have always been better at their most intimate. Captain America in the elevator, Captain Marvel's chase, Captain America and the Winter Soldier, or Cap, Bucky, and Tony duking it out. Cap had a lot of great ones, actually. Marvel hipsters of the world like to sneer and point out that none of these scenes hold a candle to Daredevil's hallway fight or Tobey Maguire's Spidey going head to head with Doc Ock on the subway. Marvel hipsters, throw away your porkpie hat, take down your Funkos, have a Coke, and smile and shut up – Daredevil has been dethroned.
The bus scene is when we first see Shang-Chi come alive. We've followed him through the movie so far as Shaun, an ordinary second generation immigrant working as a valet. Obviously, we know from the posters who he really is, but at this point we've seen no trace of his powers or abilities. That all changes when Shaun takes down a series of assassins on a bus, using various items from passengers as weapons and shields, all while rescuing the heart-attack stricken bus driver, moving the other passengers to safety, and avoiding a man with a machete for an arm. We see Shaun fight not with magic or tech, or even classic Marvel slugging, but much more dexterous and visually interesting martial arts moves, giving the bus scene a very different texture to the usual choreographed punch-and-block stunt fests.
It makes perfect use of the environment too, and is Marvel's best use of physical space since Cap's brawl in the elevator. The bus in question is an articulated bus – if you're British you 100 percent know it only as a bendy bus – meaning there are several different locations within the very tight parameters of the fight scene. We have the back of the bus, where assassins have Shaun outnumbered, but also the front of the bus, where Shaun must protect the passengers. During the fight, the central accordion partition becomes a room of its own too, before being torn open and leaving the outside world exposed while also allowing Shaun to use the fact the fight is actively in motion to his advantage.
The outside of the bus, the roof, and the doors also feature prominently in the scene, with director Destin Daniel Cretton making the vehicle feel both incredibly cramped and endlessly expansive, making the fight scene both personal and unrestricted. We see close up shots, wide shots from outside as Shaun travels along the aisle of the bus, and uninterrupted mid shots that let us see the perfectly timed attacks in motion. There are several fights in the movie, all with higher stakes and better effects than the bus showdown, but none come close to matching it. Marvel will likely stick with big VFX battles to end all of its movies, but hopefully Shang-Chi will help convince directors that smaller scale scuffles can be much more interesting.
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