IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched in the cinema (40th visit in 2021)
After "Black Panther", with an African-American director and an almost entirely black cast, was a huge box-office success, it made sense to try something similar for Asia and not least for the enormously lucrative Chinese film market. After all, the Marvel comics feature countless characters and stories from Asia that promise exciting action and spectacular fantasy elements, for example in the style of the Wuxia films, in the MCU films as well.
Marvel already learned that a direct transposition of the comics is not always wise with the Netflix series "Iron Fist", which was sharply criticised because Asian characters appeared in rather stereotypical supporting roles. They obviously learned from this, because Marvel let it be known early on that Shang Chi's greatest comic book opponent Fu Manchu would not appear in the film, as the character invented in the 1910s is a negative stereotype of an Asian. Although the antagonist is still Shang-Chi's father, the character Wenwu has been completely reimagined and cast with Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung, who makes his first appearance in an English-language film here.
In the director's chair is Destin Daniel Cretton, another young indie director who was allowed to move up into the Marvel league and let his talent run wild on a big blockbuster budget. Thus, the first "Asian" film in the MCU gathers an international cast that, in addition to Awkwafina and established stars like Michelle Yeoh and Leung, also relies on newcomers like lead actor Simu Liu, who easily shoulders the film as a sympathetic fighter with a heart.
"Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" forms an interesting middle ground in the MCU: on the one hand, the film picks up narrative threads from earlier films, such as the Ten Rings, whom we have already encountered several times. In "Iron Man" they were the villains who kidnapped Tony Stark in Afghanistan; in "Iron Man 3" their leader Mandarin appeared twice. At the same time, new characters and new worlds are introduced, which, along with the films about Thor and Doctor Strange, probably have the greatest fantasy factor in the MCU. The fantastic creatures in Ta-Lo, for example, are a kind of mixture of Chinese mythology and Pokémon and thus provide some wow factor.
In addition to the fantasy elements, the 25th Marvel film offers enormous spectacle in the elaborately staged fight sequences; the long fight on the bus in San Francisco is particularly exciting and leaves a lasting impression. Compared to the action, the story is kept rather simple, but this hardly diminishes the film's entertainment factor, because the film knows how to inspire in other ways. It is the more emotional scenes that are convincing, such as the friendship between Shang-Chi and Katy and the relationship with his family members. The highlight of the film is the astonishingly sensitive and multi-layered character of Wenwu, played by Tony Leung, who is a complex figure with comprehensible motives and with whom one can even sympathise, far from the usual Marvel villain.
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