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
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