Review: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Superhero movies, at least under the Disney / Marvel regime, are largely about taking other genres and putting a Marvel logo up front. It's largely the other studios (including Sony using Marvel characters) that are making "traditional" superhero movies about crazy villains and reality-shattering plots; Marvel's superhero model is to find another popular action genre, drop some superheroes in, make some wise-cracks, and tie it all into the MCU after the credits roll.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings works not because superheroes and martial arts are a logical fit (most superhero fights have at least some martial arts thrown in there somewhere), but because the super-heroic stuff is kept to a bare minimum. It's a Disney martial arts movie that occasionally makes off-hand references to the rest of the Marvel universe, and it's all the better for it.

Shaun (Simu Liu) spends his days parking cars at a hotel in San Francisco with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) and his nights singing karaoke, again with his best friend Katy. Her family thinks they're wasting their lives; his family... isn't mentioned. Then a mysterious band of thugs attack them on a bus looking to steal the jade pendant his mother gave him, it turns out his previously unmentioned martial arts skills are irrepressible, and one demolished bus later Shaun / Shang is off to Macau with Katy in tow to find his sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) in an illegal superpowered fight club.

Turns out their father is Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), possessor of the legendary Ten Rings (though what kind of legend are they when everyone knows he has them?) and chief of a thousand year-old crime society. Any resemblance to characters like Fu Manchu are deliberate - in the original comics, Manchu was Shang's father - but this goes out of its way to avoid the yellow peril cliches.

Wenwu put his crime life into hibernation when he fell in love with their mother (Fala Chen), who was the guardian of Ta Lo, a mysterious supernatural village. She's been dead for over a decade - only their father, now back on the evil side of the street, thinks he has a way to bring her back...

A run of decent fights early on and some fun chemistry between the two leads provides some strong bedrock for what turns out to be a fairly solid, if only moderately spectacular, Marvel origin story. Putting some effort into developing the character of the main villain (a definite rarity for a Marvel film) pays off big time as well, though the rest of the supporting cast - with the exception of Michelle Yeoh - largely fade into the background.

Like a lot of recent Marvel movies, there's two axis of comparison here. As a superhero movie it's a lot of fun, a done-in-one package that provides all the required thrills - and a few surprises - while hitting all the required notes with impressive force. As a martial arts movie it's a little flat; the fights are good and generally well framed (so we can tell what's actually going on) but the CGI required for the superhero effects detracts from the feel of seeing real people doing real stunts that makes the best fights so thrilling.

That's possibly why the final act, which swerves into all-out fantasy, works so well. It brings something fresh to the MCU, and provides yet another twist on the usual superheroics. One day Marvel's going to run out of genres to drop superheroes into; for now, it's a formula that keeps on serving up winners.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Don't Breathe 2

Don't Breathe 2 is an odd sequel in a number of ways. For one, it's late: the original Don't Breathe was released in 2016 and slotted into the then-current trend for "elevated horror" (see also: It Follows) despite mostly being a fairly grungy high concept horror where a trio of would-be thieves broke into an old blind guys house only to discover it's full of traps, he's basically Daredevil as far as hearing goes, and there's a twist with a turkey baster nobody in their right mind saw coming.

It's also a sequel where we're supposed to forget all that - or at least, the turkey baster stuff - because this time the bad guy, Norman Nordstrom, AKA "The Blind Man" (Stephen Lang) is... okay, he's not the good guy, but he's more of a badass than a bad dude. 

The real lead is eleven year old Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), who lives with Norman, doesn't get to go out much and spends her days being taught survival tactics because they live in Detroit 2021. Watch out for the roving gangs of murderers hanging around the shelter full of surplus orphans!

On an extremely rare trip to the outside world, Phoenix and Hernandez (Stephanie Arcila), Norman's only link to humanity so let's not get too attached here, encounter a scuzzy group of van-dwelling dirtbags while a TV in the background runs a news story about a missing Doctor wanted for organ-legging. Could these things be connected? Yes, but not in the way you're probably thinking.

The middle chunk of the film is basically a retread of the first film - criminals turn up at Norman's house looking to grab something, only to realise they've bitten off more than they can chew - though because we're meant to be (somewhat) on Norman's side he's not quite the supernatural killing machine he was first time around. He's still a blind man taking out the trash, but he's struggling with it and not all the trash gets taken all the way out to the bin.

Home invasion films (and even just sequences in a film) are pretty much sure-fire as far as tension goes. They're basically filmed games of hide and seek, and Phoenix's survival skills come in handy as she's got to creep around the house trying to avoid the stalker squad. One nice touch is she never runs, just walks quickly and firmly when she has to, which is the kind of minor moment of competency that makes a film seem like it knows what it's doing.

Because this isn't quite a horror film, and the bad guys have an agenda that isn't quite "murder murder murder", it's able to pull off a few minor gear changes during the home invasion scenes that keep things slightly more interesting than the usual "find them and kill them". The small attempts to give the cartoon thugs some character and motivation, combined with a hero who's both blind and on the back foot in any direct physical confrontation (while also still implausibly effective) makes this just a little more suspenseful than it should be.

A big test for a film where an immovable object runs up against a force that only seems unstoppable for the first hour or so is how well it can delay the point where it goes from "aw shit, how's he going to survive this?"  to "hell yeah, the bad guys are screwed now". This manages to delay it a lot longer than you might expect for a sequel, as the third act throws in a few twists (including a location change) that may not be entirely plausible for a crime film but work just fine as this slides a little further down towards the horror end of the scale. Everything here is nuts if you think about it, but it's all equally nuts so it evens out.

To be fair, all this is qualified praise: it's still a trashy, over the top home invasion thriller largely held together by Lang's imposing physical presence and a script that barrels forward at a rate designed to prevent reflection. It's a relatively standard, if competently crafted, thrill-ride - until you remember what Nordstrom was doing in the first film, which makes this sequel's (relatively effective) attempts to turn him into a good guy one of the craziest plot twists in recent cinematic history. 

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Summer of Soul

The big question with this kind of documentary is: just how much of a documentary does this need to be? If the selling point is the footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, featuring a cavalcade of the best and most important Black musicians in America across six Sundays, how much explaining and context do we need - especially when every minute of talking heads or historical background is a minute less of the music?

There will always be people dissatisfied no matter what the approach. Personally, fingers crossed that eventually there's a way to release the whole series of concerts (or as much as feasible) as stand alone performances; short of that, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) is the best result we could ask for.

Presented by director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson from footage originally shot by Hal Tulchin (and then "lost" for half a century), Summer of Soul does a near-perfect job of putting the event in context while still giving the performances room to breathe. It's a thrilling ride, a backstage pass combined with front row seats to a festival of artists working at their peak.

It doesn't hurt that the backdrop itself is so interesting: the changes in Black America, and Harlem in particular, the social tensions of the time, the shifts in fashion (trad suits popular in week one were in the trash by week six), and the various political and economic balls that had to be juggled just to make the event happen are all intriguing.

But it's the acts themselves that are the real draw here, ranging from gospel groups and all but forgotten one-hit wonders to icons of the hippie era (the mixed race performers in Sly and the Family Stone set some audience members aback) and icons like Nina Simone and a (surprisingly confronting) Stevie Wonder - make sure to sit through the end credits to see Wonder verbally take down an assistant on stage in brutal fashion.

On their own, the performances are always interesting and often outstanding. Taken together, they make up an essential guide to the ins and outs of Black music and culture, reaching back into the past while pointing the way to the future. Talking head interviews with many of the surviving musicians only adds to the insights. Some were thrilled, others nervous; careers were on the cusp of greatness, starting a downwards slide, or just happy to be there.

Summer of Soul stands out as a reflection of an exhilarating moment in history, a record of an outstanding series of concerts, and a chance to see some of the funkiest fashions 1969 could serve up. It's a toe-tapping, feel-good triumph.

- Anthony Morris