[7.3/10] They’re probably never going to make an entirely quiet, introspective, down-to-earth movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We might be able to get that sort of thing on television with WandaVision or Loki when a cooldown episode is acceptable before the big giant fight scene. But that’s not what people come to superhero movies for. So every MCU film needs to end with the computer-generated fireworks du jour, lest moviegoers feel like they haven’t gotten their money’s worth.
It’s a shame because I mostly liked Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings! And then it’s overstuffed, overblown, uninvolving final act hit and stomped the whole movie down a notch. It’s not exactly a quiet film up until that point, but it’s one rooted in character, humor, and action sequences that punctuate those elements rather than crowd them out.
Shang-Chi is, like the MCU that preceded it, something of a family film, in the sense that it’s as much about its title character resolving issues with his father, reconciling with his sister, and the lot of them processing their complicated feelings over his mother’s death. There’s meat and meaning there, and the way the film is structured, including the ways it spackles those serious reveals about Shang-Chi’s family life with quality humor, means it never feels too heavy.
Seriously, the comedy stylings of Awkwafina and Ben Kingsley are worth the price of admission alone. The latter returns as Trevor Slattery, the actor/terrorist impersonator who is just as amusing as he was in Iron Man 2 and has more of a canvas to paint on this time around. His inclusion is a treat and in-joke, and the Oscar-winner is incredibly game.
Likewise, Awkwafina plays Katy, Shang-Chi’s best friend, and the character who’s able to take the stuffing out of all the deadly-serious lore-dropping and mortal threats in an entertaining way. And, like a lot of Marvel films, The Legend of the Ten Rings often works best as a buddy comedy, and her dynamic with the title character makes both endearing and lightens our protagonist up in ways that improve him as a leading player in this sandbox.
That’s probably my biggest complaint before the final act -- Shang-Chi himself is a bit bland as a character. He’s not bad, and Simu Liu does fine in the role. But he’s the least interesting major player in his own movie. Katy is a lot more fun and her arc, while oversimplified, has a clarity his lacks. Shang Chi’s sister, Xialing, has a more compelling angle as the overlooked daughter who built her own empire despite loss, neglect, and abandonment. His father, Wenwu, has the most engrossing backstory in the film, a conqueror who committed terrible deeds but found peace through true love, only to devolve into darkness and obsession when that love was lost. Shang-Chi is solid enough, but picking any of these characters as an alternate protagonist would have been an improvement for the story.
And while each of them basically exists to advance Shang-Chi’s personal arc, each has a journey both clearer and more compelling than his too. The main theme of Shang-Chi’s personal growth and eventual path here are muddled as all hell. The ideas they dance around are easy enough to identify. It seems like the film is trying to tell a story of identity, with Shang-Chi accepting and reconciling the different parts of his family history and personal experiences to crystalize the person he is today. It works well for a story that is both Chinese and Chinese-American, as he ultimately accepts the different parts of his past he’s been “running from” and finds his strength in the resolution.
That dovetails nicely with the structure of the film. Make no mistake, there is a lot of backstory and lore and world-building that The Legend of the Ten Rings concerns itself with. And yet, rather than just giving us one big infodump or one all-consuming flashback, the movie parcels out these details as we go. It helps gradually put the pieces of Shang-Chi himself, and the corner of the world he escaped from and returns to, into a context in an organic, well-paced way. The structural choices are the film’s hidden strength and part of what helps the medicine go down.
But by the time the third act rolls around, the film has trouble tying it all together, especially for Shang-Chi on the usual “punch stuff and have a personal breakthrough” path that most Marvel heroes go through. The self-identity material gets jumbled up with various notions of not succumbing to fear, on top of amorphous ideas about recovering from trauma. Each of these are worthy lines to follow, but The Legend of the Ten Rings tries to chase them all at once. And it leaves the overall point of Shang-Chi’s personal journey, and the steps he takes toward self-actualization, unclear and unsatisfying.
But much of that is just the way the time and space it would take to truly explore those notions is handed over to the latest CGI maelstrom. The film’s climax is another overextended mess, with three “boss fights” for lack of a better turn which lack enough of a rhythm or meaning or sense of progression to hold the audience’s attention. The overreliance of unconvincing computer generated settings and creatures makes the finale feel downright Star Wars prequel-esque. Visually, the big final battle is a bowl of mush splattered over an early 2010s phone background, with dragon-riding scenes and energy bolt battles looking conspicuously green-screened in a way that takes you out of the film.
It’s a shame, because there’s some above average fights in The Legend of the Ten Rings. When the movie feels more contained: a claustrophobic scuffle on a bus, an emotion-laden skirmish between siblings, and dance-like confrontation between soon-to-be lovers, the film’s martial arts quotient sings. The team that put together this film is more than capable of delivering that level of pugilistic excitement, even if the camera movements get a little overactive at times, detracting from the thrilling hand-to-hand combat that deserves the time and space to be savored.
The same goes for the character work and humor. Shang-Chi and Katy’s relationship feels lived in and fun. The struggles of a family to deal with loss, expectation, and old demons returning home is compelling. The moments when Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a human story -- hell, even the moments when it’s a martial arts movie -- are suffused with the laughs and bonds and sense of the personal amid the extraordinary that put Marvel on top.
But even the inimitable Michelle Yeoh can’t save the loud, ugly, overlong thud that the movie ends with. The third act fireworks will probably always be a fact of life when it comes to tentpole MCU films like this one. But rarely do they so undermine all the good work the movie’s done to that point, in an explosion of character-muddling, eyeball-staunching, story-stomping disappointment.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-11-06T05:41:45Z
[7.3/10] They’re probably never going to make an entirely quiet, introspective, down-to-earth movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We might be able to get that sort of thing on television with WandaVision or Loki when a cooldown episode is acceptable before the big giant fight scene. But that’s not what people come to superhero movies for. So every MCU film needs to end with the computer-generated fireworks du jour, lest moviegoers feel like they haven’t gotten their money’s worth.
It’s a shame because I mostly liked Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings! And then it’s overstuffed, overblown, uninvolving final act hit and stomped the whole movie down a notch. It’s not exactly a quiet film up until that point, but it’s one rooted in character, humor, and action sequences that punctuate those elements rather than crowd them out.
Shang-Chi is, like the MCU that preceded it, something of a family film, in the sense that it’s as much about its title character resolving issues with his father, reconciling with his sister, and the lot of them processing their complicated feelings over his mother’s death. There’s meat and meaning there, and the way the film is structured, including the ways it spackles those serious reveals about Shang-Chi’s family life with quality humor, means it never feels too heavy.
Seriously, the comedy stylings of Awkwafina and Ben Kingsley are worth the price of admission alone. The latter returns as Trevor Slattery, the actor/terrorist impersonator who is just as amusing as he was in Iron Man 2 and has more of a canvas to paint on this time around. His inclusion is a treat and in-joke, and the Oscar-winner is incredibly game.
Likewise, Awkwafina plays Katy, Shang-Chi’s best friend, and the character who’s able to take the stuffing out of all the deadly-serious lore-dropping and mortal threats in an entertaining way. And, like a lot of Marvel films, The Legend of the Ten Rings often works best as a buddy comedy, and her dynamic with the title character makes both endearing and lightens our protagonist up in ways that improve him as a leading player in this sandbox.
That’s probably my biggest complaint before the final act -- Shang-Chi himself is a bit bland as a character. He’s not bad, and Simu Liu does fine in the role. But he’s the least interesting major player in his own movie. Katy is a lot more fun and her arc, while oversimplified, has a clarity his lacks. Shang Chi’s sister, Xialing, has a more compelling angle as the overlooked daughter who built her own empire despite loss, neglect, and abandonment. His father, Wenwu, has the most engrossing backstory in the film, a conqueror who committed terrible deeds but found peace through true love, only to devolve into darkness and obsession when that love was lost. Shang-Chi is solid enough, but picking any of these characters as an alternate protagonist would have been an improvement for the story.
And while each of them basically exists to advance Shang-Chi’s personal arc, each has a journey both clearer and more compelling than his too. The main theme of Shang-Chi’s personal growth and eventual path here are muddled as all hell. The ideas they dance around are easy enough to identify. It seems like the film is trying to tell a story of identity, with Shang-Chi accepting and reconciling the different parts of his family history and personal experiences to crystalize the person he is today. It works well for a story that is both Chinese and Chinese-American, as he ultimately accepts the different parts of his past he’s been “running from” and finds his strength in the resolution.
That dovetails nicely with the structure of the film. Make no mistake, there is a lot of backstory and lore and world-building that The Legend of the Ten Rings concerns itself with. And yet, rather than just giving us one big infodump or one all-consuming flashback, the movie parcels out these details as we go. It helps gradually put the pieces of Shang-Chi himself, and the corner of the world he escaped from and returns to, into a context in an organic, well-paced way. The structural choices are the film’s hidden strength and part of what helps the medicine go down.
But by the time the third act rolls around, the film has trouble tying it all together, especially for Shang-Chi on the usual “punch stuff and have a personal breakthrough” path that most Marvel heroes go through. The self-identity material gets jumbled up with various notions of not succumbing to fear, on top of amorphous ideas about recovering from trauma. Each of these are worthy lines to follow, but The Legend of the Ten Rings tries to chase them all at once. And it leaves the overall point of Shang-Chi’s personal journey, and the steps he takes toward self-actualization, unclear and unsatisfying.
But much of that is just the way the time and space it would take to truly explore those notions is handed over to the latest CGI maelstrom. The film’s climax is another overextended mess, with three “boss fights” for lack of a better turn which lack enough of a rhythm or meaning or sense of progression to hold the audience’s attention. The overreliance of unconvincing computer generated settings and creatures makes the finale feel downright Star Wars prequel-esque. Visually, the big final battle is a bowl of mush splattered over an early 2010s phone background, with dragon-riding scenes and energy bolt battles looking conspicuously green-screened in a way that takes you out of the film.
It’s a shame, because there’s some above average fights in The Legend of the Ten Rings. When the movie feels more contained: a claustrophobic scuffle on a bus, an emotion-laden skirmish between siblings, and dance-like confrontation between soon-to-be lovers, the film’s martial arts quotient sings. The team that put together this film is more than capable of delivering that level of pugilistic excitement, even if the camera movements get a little overactive at times, detracting from the thrilling hand-to-hand combat that deserves the time and space to be savored.
The same goes for the character work and humor. Shang-Chi and Katy’s relationship feels lived in and fun. The struggles of a family to deal with loss, expectation, and old demons returning home is compelling. The moments when Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a human story -- hell, even the moments when it’s a martial arts movie -- are suffused with the laughs and bonds and sense of the personal amid the extraordinary that put Marvel on top.
But even the inimitable Michelle Yeoh can’t save the loud, ugly, overlong thud that the movie ends with. The third act fireworks will probably always be a fact of life when it comes to tentpole MCU films like this one. But rarely do they so undermine all the good work the movie’s done to that point, in an explosion of character-muddling, eyeball-staunching, story-stomping disappointment.