Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ on Disney+, in Which Marvel Pays Light Homage to Chinese Action Cinema

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — fresh for your consumption on Disney+ — introduces a new hero to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kim’s Convenience star and former stuntman Simu Liu plays the title character, a nigh-peerless kung fu buttkicking artist who’s the heir to the very powerful title artifacts. Director Destin Daniel Cretton is the latest indie auteur to be amalgamated into the Hollywood machinery, shifting from exceptional tiny drama Short Term 12 and sturdy courtroom drama Just Mercy to Marvel megaspectacle. The film follows Black Widow and precedes Eternals in Phase Four of the MCU, so if you didn’t catch Shang-Chi during its successful theatrical run, now’s the time to catch up, lest you be steamrolled by the pop-cultural zeitgeist. And who wants that to happen?

SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It all started thousands of years ago, and yes, I can hear you sigh all the way over here. Wenwu (Tony Leung) acquired the Ten Rings and became so powerful and ruthlessly imperialistic, he made guys like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great look like Rainbow Brite. He chilled out a little upon discovering Ta Lo, a “village in another dimension full of magical creatures” — the script’s words, not mine. One of those magical creatures was a lady, Li (Fala Chen), who bests him in hand-to-hand combat, even with the rings on his wrists. I think this made him horny, because they soon fell in love and had two kids, one of whom is Shaun, now a lowly valet in San Francisco. His best friend is Katy (Awkwafina!, who deserves the exclamation point with every reference), and they bond over their reasonably happy lives of mild aimlessness and unfulfilled potential. And then a case of the fightskies breaks out when some goons led by a hulking meatslab named Razorfist (Florian Munteanu) start some crap on an otherwise normal ride on the city bus, targeting Shaun, who wallops them, blowing his decade-long subterfuge.

So he comes clean to Katy: He’s actually Shang-Chi, a secret warrior, and those thugs work for his dad, which means he should go to China and find his sister and deduce what in the kung pao is going on around here. Katy tags along, and now is as good a time as any to say that she and Shaun aren’t kissing, they’re purely platonic with no sexual tension, and it’s cute as heck. We get some flashbacks — so, so many flashbacks — to Shang-Chi’s childhood, which reveal that his mother is dead, he’s long estranged from his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), and the two of them were raised to be meaner-than-hell cold-blooded damn killers. You won’t be surprised to learn that having an immortal superpowered martial-arts gangster dad will mess you up; someone get Dr. Melfi on the line, please.

Before we resume with the movie plot, I must mention that Shang-Chi and Katy get a decent eyeful of Dr. Strange’s pal Wong (Benedict Wong) and the Hulkish beast Abomination (voice of Tim Roth), because Stan Lee forbid this movie go two hours without referencing its place in the grand megacanon of the MCU. Anyway, our two protags connect with Xialing — who also is a fighter to absolutely behold — and engage in precarious fisticuffs until they’re snatched by Wenwu; they also meet Trevor Slattery, the character you might remember from an Iron Man movie who was an actor pretending to be the villain Mandarin, and he’s still played by Ben Kingsley, who’s very funny in the role, despite Awkwafina! providing more than enough comic relief. Inevitably, the characters have to get to Ta Lo so there can be a big violent third-act kerblammo, and so we can see the magical creatures, one of whom is Michelle Yeoh, playing Li’s sister, Ying Nan, described by Katy as an “awesome magical kung-fu goddess,” an assessment that any sentient being would agree is spot-on. Typically, the appearance of Michelle Yeoh in a movie automatically makes the movie better, but in this case, I don’t know if that’s true. It’s also a good place to stop summarizing and say NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Marvel goes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on us, integrating a few Wuxia references into its dense narrative. Purely in the context of the MCU, its skillfully staged and choreographed fight sequences are among the series’ best (see Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the “I’m always angry” bit in The Avengers), and it makes us care reasonably deeply about some relatively obscure comic characters a la Guardians of the Galaxy.

Performance Worth Watching: Lots of talent doing lots of talented things here: Leung — veteran Wuxia star of too many great films, including In the Mood for Love and Hero — makes a terrific tragic villain. Yeoh is the portrait of grace and majesty, as usual. Liu anchors the entire affair with an earnest presence that makes him a welcome addition to the MCU. Zhang makes a strong case for a Xialing solo spinoff series or movie. But the MVP here is Awkwafina!, who functions both as our normie cypher witnessing all manner of extraordinary things, and as master wisecracker; without her exuberance, this movie might be a slog.

Memorable Dialogue: Awkwafina!: “I’m pretty confused right now. Because initially I thought your dad should see a therapist for his delusions. But then that dragon vomited a magical water map and I have no idea what’s real.”

Sex and Skin: None. People only have implied sex in the MCU.

Our Take: The first half of Shang-Chi is a terrifically entertaining stretch of film, establishing its hero as a noble type who wears cool kicks and isn’t saddled with wisecracks or an overabundance of angst. As for the second half, well, it’s hard to keep the human drama afloat when the movie unexpectedly becomes a CGI kaiju battlefest, a screeching and whirling imbroglio of mystical flying-dragon nonsense in which characters yell key bits of dialogue over the din. Narratively, it’s overstuffed and pointlessly complicated, hacked up with flashbacks and cluttered with a few too many characters. And even then, the flaws here aren’t unforgivable; if all MCU movies must adhere to formula, then at least Shang-Chi gives us something different to look at, within the context of respectful Asian representation.

Even taking its flaws into consideration, the movie has significant upside. The cast is uniformly strong and charismatic, good enough for us to forgive the movie for underusing Yeoh; we wait half the movie to see her, and then she’s challenged to channel her effervescent Wuxia-goddess vibes through a few reams of exposition. Crucially, Cretton maintains a consistent tone that balances mediumweight family drama with well-timed blasts of comedy. Early on, the director shows due diligence in terms of staging action — the bus battle and a dazzling melee on bamboo scaffolding outside a Macau skyscraper show a predilection for long, dizzying takes, deft wire work and creative camera movement. Telling the story through choreographed movement is a vital component of Wuxia cinema, which Cretton has Marvelized with some reverence. If that’s the kind of statement that makes film snobs wince a little, well, remember that Marvel movies aren’t made for that audience anyway.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Shang-Chi math: 50 percent very good + 50 percent begrudgingly acceptable = a good movie. It’s a worthy Marvel outing that almost gets eaten alive by monsters — but only almost.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on Disney+