Hi! It’s me again, with a Radical New Theory (TM).
For the last 13 years, the Marvel movie machine Borg (to mix pop culture metaphors) has been assimilating all other genres. Do you want a spy movie? A space opera? Well, Disney has sucked up all the available resources and slapped a thin layer of Marvel branding on it. Spy movie? Captain America: Winter Soldier. Space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy.
Now, it’s kung fu movies’ — or, more accurately wuxia, the Chinese blanket term for stories that blend martial arts, fantasy, and East Asian history — turn. With all of the first-gen Avengers like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans out of contract (and Scarlett Johansson suing the studio), Marvel needs a new breed of stars. To tap into a fresh supply of those sweet, sweet yuans, the first order of New Avengers business must be introducing Shang-Chi, a character modeled after Bruce Lee, to the masses. Since Iron Man was on the superhero B-list as late as 2007, Marvel considers this a solved problem. Thus, we get Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Shaun (Simu Liu) is a carefree young guy in San Francisco, spending his days working as a valet at a fancy hotel and nights carousing at karaoke bars with his bestie, Katy (Awkwafina). But one day, on the bus to work, Shaun is attacked by a bunch of karate-chopping thugs, led by a guy named Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu, aka Big Nasty) who has, you guessed it, a giant razor where his hand should be.
The big fight on the bus that ensues, in which Shaun reveals he has mad kung fu skills, is one of the best fight scenes the MCU has produced. The attackers were after a jade pendant Shaun’s dead mother Ying Li (played in flashback by Fala Chen) gave him. His estranged sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) has a matching pendant. So Shaun tells Katy his real name is Shang-Chi; his father Wenwu (Tony Leung), The Deadliest Man Alive, is a semi-immortal leader of an international crime syndicate called the Ten Rings, last seen in the MCU battling Iron Man. They’ve got to go to Macau to preemptively rescue Xialing from whatever the Ten Rings wants the pendants for.
Once in Macau, they discover Xialing has been much more industrious than her older brother. She has built a small empire out of a quasi-legal street fighting league that rakes in the cash by streaming death matches on the dark web. After Shang-Chi survives a main-event dust-up with sis (Katy makes bank by betting against him), they are attacked by the Ten Rings, which precipitates another instant classic set piece on a bamboo scaffolding.
One thing that distinguishes this film from most MCU fare is its frequent flashbacks. The Ten Rings group was named after a set of magic bracelets that grant Wenwu both practical immortality and extreme kick-assery. But the old warlord decided to settle down after getting his butt whooped by Ying Li, who was the guardian of the magic village Ta Lo. Now, Wenwu has been receiving psychic messages from Ying Li’s spirit, begging him to rescue her from captivity in Ta Lo, and he has retrieved his wayward children to help. Once Shang-Chi and Xialing reach Ta Lo, they discover the truth is quite different from what their father told them.
Shang-Chi is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose debut, Short Term 12, is one of the best independent films of the 2010s. The screenplay, which he co-wrote, is both more complex and clearer than most MCU fare, even considering the time devoted to retconning the Yellow Peril aspects of the Ten Rings so as not to offend cash-bearing Asian audiences. Simu Liu is fine as a bland everyman hero, but it’s Awkwafina as the normie sidekick comic relief who repeatedly steals the show.
Turns out, wuxia is the perfect fit for the superhero formula. Which brings me to my Radical New Theory: What if the MCU films have always secretly been wuxia at heart? Think about it: an elite class of super-warriors defend civilization and the innocent with martial arts. No matter how out-there superhero storylines are, problems are always solved by people in tights punching each other. So Shang-Chi does not represent Marvel co-opting East-West crossovers like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as much as it is reconnecting with its roots. Regardless, Shang-Chi definitely ranks among the more entertaining installments as the MCU grinds endlessly on, devouring everything in its path.