Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) Review

Official trailer

I haven’t watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I’ve seen the available clips, the trailers, and serious critical and audience discussion. The 6.5 stands based on what the available material shows, the wider critical reception, and the documented commercial response. The film is one of the better Phase Four MCU entries despite the wider phase’s collapse. Tony Leung’s Wenwu performance has been widely cited as one of the franchise’s stronger antagonist achievements.

The martial arts choreography draws on Hong Kong cinema traditions that distinguish the film from the franchise’s standard combat conventions. The film also works with third-act execution problems that the wider franchise pattern has consistently produced. The 6.5 reflects evaluation based on cumulative available evidence.

What I’ve seen of it makes me like it more than almost anything else Marvel put out in that stretch. The clips have real fighting in them, with bodies and timing, and Tony Leung looks like he wandered in from a much better film and decided to stay. I can also see the usual Marvel collapse waiting at the end. A 6.5 is me liking what’s there and not trusting the finale.

The Setup

Based on available material and critical coverage: Shang-Chi has been living in San Francisco under the name Shaun, working as a hotel valet with his friend Katy. He’s been concealing his past as the trained-assassin son of Xu Wenwu, the immortal warrior who has commanded the Ten Rings organization for over a thousand years through the power of ten mystical bracelets. Wenwu’s agents attack Shang-Chi to retrieve a pendant his deceased mother had given him.

The middle act involves Shang-Chi traveling to Macau to find his sister Xialing, who has built her own underground fighting empire after their father abandoned her. Wenwu captures both siblings and reveals his plan to break into the hidden mystical village of Ta Lo where he believes a soul-stealing entity that’s been manipulating him is holding their deceased mother captive.

The third act involves the siblings escaping to Ta Lo to warn the village, the eventual revelation that the entity Wenwu sensed is a far worse dark force called the Dweller-in-Darkness, and the climactic battle between the village forces and the released Dweller’s army.

Tony Leung As Wenwu

Tony Leung plays Xu Wenwu in his Hollywood debut. The casting brought considerable Hong Kong cinema legacy capital to the role.

Leung’s career history (In the Mood for Love, Hard Boiled, Infernal Affairs, major other work with Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, and other major Hong Kong directors) provided the gravity that the Wenwu role requires. The performance has been widely cited as one of the franchise’s stronger antagonist achievements.

The character work succeeds through Wenwu’s specific psychology. He’s a thousand-year-old warrior who has accumulated power across centuries while maintaining real love for his deceased wife. His grief over her death and his belief that she may still be alive provide coherent emotional foundation for his antagonist actions. Wenwu is an antagonist with real interior life, not generic villain ambition.

Leung is the draw for me. A villain who’s still grieving his wife is more interesting than any villain who just wants power, and even from the clips you can see him play that grief without ever asking for sympathy.

The Wenwu role also addresses long-standing comic source material problems. The Mandarin was created in 1964, using racial stereotypes that haven’t aged well. Iron Man 3 (2013, rated 5 in this review series) had attempted to handle the source material through the Trevor Slattery comedic reveal. Shang-Chi reimagines the character entirely through Wenwu, giving him real characterization that the original comic version lacked. The reimagining works because it commits to specific character development instead of to ironic deflection.

Leung’s performance level represents one of the franchise’s clearest examples of casting providing depth that the script alone couldn’t establish. The Hong Kong cinema legacy that Leung brings to the role raises the material above what most MCU villains receive. The pattern is similar to other successful MCU villain castings (Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull, Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, Christian Bale’s Gorr) where established dramatic actors brought career capital to genre roles.

The Martial Arts Choreography

The film draws extensively on Hong Kong cinema martial arts traditions that distinguish the combat from the MCU’s standard action conventions.

The bus sequence early in the runtime features extended combat choreography that integrates the moving bus’s specific physics into the fighting. The bamboo scaffolding sequence in Macau works through wuxia-influenced vertical movement that emphasizes physical capability over explosion-based spectacle. The Ta Lo combat sequences feature stylized choreography that honors specific martial arts traditions.

The bus fight is the clip that sold me. I love watching fighters use the space they’re in, and that sequence treats the bus like a partner in the fight.

The scaffolding in Macau looks just as good. After years of Marvel heroes trading glowing punches against gray skies, this felt like somebody remembered what an action scene is for.

The choreography commitment is structurally significant. Most MCU action sequences work through generic superhero combat conventions with limited cultural specificity. Shang-Chi’s commitment to Hong Kong-influenced martial arts gives the film distinct combat identity that the wider franchise rarely achieves. The trade between franchise-standard action and culturally-specific choreography produces results that distinguish this film from most MCU productions.

Simu Liu performs heavy portions of the choreography directly instead of relying primarily on stunt doubles. Liu’s physical ability (built partly through stunt work early in his career) gives the combat sequences real physical commitment that lesser physical preparation would have undermined. The casting decision matched performer capability to character requirements in ways that the production benefits from throughout.

The Phase Four Context

In September 2021, Shang-Chi released between Black Widow (July 2021, rated 0 in this review series) and Eternals (November 2021, rated 1). The phase had opened with significant audience-confidence damage from Black Widow and would continue declining through later productions. Shang-Chi is one of the phase’s better entries despite the wider collapse.

The film’s relative success showed that Phase Four problems weren’t inherent to the wider franchise’s creative capabilities but were specific to individual production decisions. Productions that committed to real character work, culturally-specific detail, and earned dramatic foundation (Shang-Chi, Spider-Man: No Way Home) worked at higher craft level than productions that relied on decorative thematic signaling (Eternals, Love and Thunder, The Marvels). The pattern across the phase indicates that the franchise’s collapse was a creative choice instead of a structural inevitability.

It’s also one of the franchise’s clearer examples of cultural-specificity as essential structural foundation. The Chinese cultural elements throughout the production (the language, the costumes, the mythology, the martial arts traditions, the Ta Lo village design) are integrated narrative elements, not decorative additions. The pattern stands in contrast to productions that layer cultural elements on top of standard superhero plot without affecting the wider narrative structure.

I’d take this over Eternals any day, and I think the difference is that somebody on this film cared about the culture it drew from. You can see it in the clips. The costumes, the language and the village all look lived in.

The Third-Act Problems

In Ta Lo, the third-act climactic battle works at considerably lower craft level than the wider film’s strengths.

The Dweller-in-Darkness antagonist appears late in the runtime without sufficient setup to establish its threat. The creature designs (the Great Protector dragon, the soul-stealing dark entities) work through computer-generated spectacle that lacks the cultural specificity the earlier scenes had established. The battle choreography prioritizes visual scale over the physics-grounded martial arts that distinguished the film’s earlier action.

The pattern is the wider MCU issue of third-act problems that the franchise has consistently produced across multiple productions. Films that work at high craft level through their middle acts frequently encounter execution problems in their climactic sequences.

The pattern reflects franchise production decisions about how to deploy visual effects budgets and how to handle climactic spectacle within the standardized franchise structure. Shang-Chi exhibits the pattern despite its broader strengths.

I’d throw out the third act. A soul-stealing monster nobody set up, a dragon, and a wall of CGI where the earlier fights had people in them. I’d have cut the Dweller entirely and kept the climax about Shang-Chi and his father, since that’s the story the film had been telling all along. The 6.5 is the good stuff pulled down by that ending.

Craft: The Phase Four Success That Demonstrated The Alternative

Is Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings worth watching?

A 6.5. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is one of the better Phase Four MCU entries and the film that showed the wider phase’s problems were creative choices instead of structural inevitabilities. Tony Leung’s Wenwu provides one of the franchise’s stronger antagonist performances. The martial arts choreography draws on Hong Kong cinema traditions. The Chinese cultural elements are essential structural foundation. The third-act Dweller-in-Darkness sequences work at lower craft level than the wider film’s strengths. The film succeeded commercially despite COVID-era theatrical limitations.

I haven’t sat through the whole film, so the 6.5 comes from the clips, the trailers and what critics and audiences have said about it.

What I’ve seen makes me want to like it. Leung, the bus fight and the scaffolding look better than most of what Marvel made in that phase, and the CGI finale looks like the same finale every one of these films has. That split lands it a notch above average for me.

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