SPOILER-FREE
"You are a product of all who came before you. The light and the dark, the legacy of your family."
Inexplicably it has taken thirteen years for the MCU to finally have an Asian-American superhero. I think though that this film was a bit of a risk for Marvel Studios, not because of having an Asian lead, but because this is a character with a pretty limited fan-base in comic books and the character was not introduced in a previous films as has been the tendency after phase two. Fortunately though the film really works excellently.
Shaun (Simu Liu) is a normal guy working as a parking valet in San Francisco with his friend Katy (Awkwafina). When he is attacked on a bus he reveals to Katy that he is actually the son of the leader of the Ten Rings organisation Wenwu (Tony Leung) and is really called Shang-Chi. Together they travel to Macau to help Shang-Chi's sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) and there they meet Wenwu and gradually discover his plans and realise they endanger the whole world.
What really works well here is the family dynamic that is introduced. It's all about Shang-Chi and Xialing's relationship with their father Wenwu and it's extremely complicated. There's lots of flashbacks that reveal their background and at times there's a lot of love shown. However, that love often runs sour and Wenwu treats his children abominably. It's fascinating though because Wenwu isn't an out and out villain- there's certainly goodness in him and his motivations are pretty reasonable. He's perhaps the MCU's most complicated villain to date and that also means he's quite hard for Shang-Chi to fight mentally.
The film does an excellent job with it's Asian focus and really gets this side of things right. The early parts of the film touch on what it is like to be an Asian American with a telling line about challenges at school. Then we go to Asia with lots of mythology taken from that part of the world being included. Wenwu is a million miles away from being the racist caricature that Shang-Chi's comic book father Fu Manchu was and instead feels like a well-rounded and very human character. The film also does a good job at moving on from the way the Ten Rings were portrayed in Iron Man 3 and it was interesting to see Wenwu actually distance himself from the name "the Mandarin".
The action in this film is utterly superb, the highlight probably being the early bus sequence where there's very little Marvel shenanigans' and it's just excellent martial art style fighting. It helps that the cast do a large chunk of their own stunts- there's very few masks here- and it's abundantly clear that they've trained incredibly hard. The action becomes more fantastical at the climax with some really fantastic CG but it never becomes too much of a CG mess.
The cast are fantastic here. Tony Leung is a wonderful addition to the MCU but we already knew he was fantastic. Simu Liu was an unknown for me but he's perfect in this role, excellently portraying a character who is struggling with his identity but able to have fun when appropriate and really looks and acts like a superhero. Awkwafina's Katy is a lot of fun but it's nice to see she is much more than just comic relief and actually undergoes her own character arc. There's an excellent supporting cast to including a returning MCU actor who is once again having a lot of fun here.
All in all, I thought this was a really strong Marvel outing. It's great to see them make a film with an majority Asian cast and carefully deal with the history of this and other Asian characters in comic books and the MCU. It looks fantastic, the action sequences are right up with the best Marvel have ever done and the family dynamic at the centre of the film is really effective. I can't wait to see more of these characters!
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