3 stars. PG-13. 2 hours 12 minutes.
Each new Marvel movie — and there are more than 20 at this point — bills itself as a different kind of MCU excursion. How else to pretend there’s something fresh to see in this clockwork, 13-year-old franchise?
But it’s occasionally true, as when 2014’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” piped air into Marvel’s self-important cinematic bubble, or when 2018’s “Black Panther” gave Black excellence its overdue lead in a big-budget Disney flick. They were followed by 2019’s “Captain Marvel,” which featured the MCU’s first female lead, and will continue with Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao’s “The Eternals,” to be released Nov. 5.
“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” which hits theaters Sept. 3, is one of those: A slick, groundbreaking U.S. tentpole sanded down for international cinema, and a puzzle piece in MCU’s larger Phase 4. For the first time, it includes long stretches of dialogue in Chinese, and focuses almost exclusively on Asian faces while being helmed by an Asian-American director in Destin Daniel Cretton.
I can’t say what this means to Asian-Americans, given my own cultural background. But as someone who sees the dire need for more diversity in U.S. cinema, at every level, it feels like a leap forward — especially when so much racism has been directed at Asians, and Chinese-Americans in particular, over the last five years.
Here’s an American movie where being Asian isn’t a character’s sole trait, as continues to be the case in most would-be, Hollywood blockbusters.
After the usual MCU/Disney exposition about magic relics and hidden dimensions — this time filtered through Chinese folklore — we meet Simi Lui as Shang-Chi. He’s living in San Francisco under the name Sean and working as a valet with his old buddy Katy (Awkwafina). His apparent lack of ambition is a front: He’s a world-class assassin who’s been hiding out since fleeing his father’s training compound as a teenager. When a ho-hum bus ride is violently shattered by members of the Ten Rings — his father’s elite terrorist group, previously glimpsed in MCU’s “Iron Man” trilogy — Shang-Chi springs into action, dropping Katy’s jaw in the process.
Shang-Chi is an uncertain hero and, as played by Lui, a warm, thoughtful lead who grounds his evolution in believable beats. After the bus attack, he catches Katy up on the stories of his sister, Xialing (Meng’er Zhang); his late mother, Leiko Wu (Fala Chen); his mom’s legendary lost village known as Ta-Lo; and the long, brutal history of his father, Wenwu (Tony Leung Chui-wai).
They travel to Macau, where grown-up Xialing runs a dark-web fighting ring. The whirlwind of venues allows for wisecracks to leaven the PTSD-inducing flashbacks, although they don’t feel as cartoonishly out of place as in all-or-nothing fables like “Avengers: Endgame.” Awkwafina deserves all credit for that; as Katy she integrates herself masterfully into the film’s vertigo-inducing fights and chases.
The elaborate martial arts sequences make ingenious use of their environments, especially the scaffolding of a mirrored high-rise. Shang-Chi is an assassin but also a regular guy lacking superpowers. Like June’s “Black Widow,” that subtly ups the stakes, giving the fights a meatier feel than the CGI bloat in most Marvel punch-fests. Predictably, it all wobbles a bit in a bloated third act where Shang-Chi trains with Jiang Nan (Michelle Yeoh), then confronts daddy Wenwu and the film’s namesake glowing artifacts.
Still, it’s a refreshing lift for this next phase of Marvel’s world domination. You leave genuinely wanting to see more of Shang-Chi, even as we know we’ll be meeting him again very soon.
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