Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings brings into sharp focus an issue that’s become increasingly prominent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As it has continued to dig deeper and deeper into a catalog that dates back to 1939, looking for what else might be available for adaptation, Marvel Studios is increasingly sanding away the distinctive character traits that led to considerable critical and commercial acclaim for Marvel Comics publications starting in the 1960s.
The essence of this film’s take on Shang-Chi, played by Simu Liu, is mostly the same as his comic-book counterpart, who made his debut in Special Marvel Edition #15 back in 1973: a martial-arts expert trained in various fighting styles by a father revealed to be a power-mad supervillain. But if Shang-Chi’s backstory and how it induces a moral crisis felt idiosyncratic on the page, here the superhero is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting heroes in the MCU, from Star-Lord to Spider-Man.
Narratively, the film does devote a great deal of time to delving into Shang-Chi’s warrior grooming at the hands of his centuries-old father, Wenwu (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has been a conqueror throughout history thanks to his mastery of rings of magic iron that make him unbeatable in combat. Having long ago run away from home, Shang-Chi is lured back into his father’s clandestine empire by the man’s desire to revive his dead wife (Fala Chen), with or without the aid of Shang-Chi and his estranged sister, Xialing (Meng’er Zhang).
This premise could have been fairly described as Shakespearean if the film didn’t consistently shy away from Shang-Chi reckoning with the trauma that he’s faced since childhood to generically focus on our reluctant hero gradually embracing his superhuman powers. It doesn’t help that Liu fails to convey the profound misgivings that Shang-Chi might have about accepting his role as a fighter. His is a curiously affectless performance that can’t begin to hold a candle to what Leung brings to the film. Swinging remarkably between resilience and vulnerability, Leung effortlessly conveys the calm malice with which Wenwu asserts his absolute power as well as the anguish that the man feels over the loss of his wife.
Also unfortunate is that the details of Shang-Chi’s trauma are doled out by way of increasingly superfluous flashbacks that bring the narrative to a crawl every time the film is starting to work up a head of steam. The emotional flatness of these scenes is only underscored by the characteristic Marvel quips, mostly delivered by Shang-chi’s best friend, Katy (Awkwafina), in what may be the most perfunctory display of comic relief in the MCU to date. There’s also the matter of the film’s laughable moral calculus, which finds it equally reprehensible that Wenwu would brutally condition his son from pre-adolescence to become a killer and that the conqueror would chauvinistically refuse to put his daughter through the same training.
All of this might have been elevated by the presence of martial arts scenes driven primarily by complex practical stunts. But even the most grounded choreography is plainly being aided by computer effects, and the chopped-up close-ups on the action consistently reduce the sparring characters to a blur. As per usual for the MCU, the final act devolves into loud and chaotic visual nonsense, with the Oedipal reckoning between Shang-Chi and Wenwu giving way to an incomprehensible conflagration of magical beasts and largescale warfare that only further emphasizes the lack of interest that the film has in its ostensibly probing human drama.
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