Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel Studios, Fox Australia, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Tuesday night I went with the Bears San Diego to the UltraStar Cinemas in Hazard Center to see the much-ballyhooed new film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I just read an article the Los Angeles Times published about it on September 7 (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-09-04/shang-chi-marvel-representation-reactions), the day I went to see it, which had been preceded by a “Spoiler Alert” warning that you shouldn’t read the article until you had seen the film, so I didn’t (though in truth there weren’t that many giveaways) and it was mostly a discussion with three Asian-American film geeks, Justin Chang, Jen Yamato and Tracy Brown, about whether, and to what extent, the film answers and goes beyond the stereotyped “Yellow Peril” depictions of villainy of most Asian characters in comic books and the films derived from them. I had also seen two of the film’s stars, Simu Liu (who plays Shang-Chi) and Awkwafina (his girlfriend Katy, a fully assimilated Chinese-American whereas “Sean,” a.k.a. Shang-Chi, still retains many of his Chinese roots), on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. They also showed clips of the film that let me know for the first time that it is set in the present day – I had assumed it was sort of an Asian Game of Thrones, set in medieval China with characters loosely based on Chinese legends.

It begins with a prologue detailing how Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung) discovered the titular ten rings (which are really bracelets rather than rings; five fit on each arm and give him not only super-powers but also immortality) and used them to start a secret army of evil, also known as the Ten Rings, which for 1,000 years has been intervening in other countries, blowing up people and their seats of power if they get in its way (though we’re never told much about what they’ve actually done) and changing the course of human history on several occasions. Only Xu’s power starts to wane when he meets a woman named Li (Fala Chen) from a secret city called Ta Lo, which has been so deeply hidden in the Chinese jungle it’s escaped Xu’s malign intentions until now. Xu falls for Ying and courts her in what amounts to a martial-arts battle set largely in mid-air (at this point I was reminded of the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which I’m rather surprised hasn’t been mentioned as an antecedent in the critical literature on this film). I always like it when a modern-day director (in this case Destin Daniel Cretton, who’s Hawai’ian rather than Chinese) follows Alfred Hitchcock’s advice to shoot murders like love scenes and love scenes like murders. Like Baron Münchhausen at the end of the marvelous 1944 German version of the story, Xu is sufficiently taken with Ying that he’s willing to give up his immortality and live out a normal human life span to be with her, and he marries her and has two children, Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang). Then Ying dies and Xu sends his kids away to protect him from whatever even more malevolent evil may or may not have killed her.

Shang-Chi ends up in the U.S., lives as “Sean,” goes to college and gets a degree in Engiish literature that is of so little use in today’s job market he ends up doing valet parking at a swanky hotel – which is how he meets Katy, who is working the same job and is similarly overqualified. As for Xialing, we don’t learn what became of her for a while but when we do, it turns out that even though she’s only 16, she’s built her own super-club in Macao where she hosts extreme fights (including one between a human and a bear – John Cox, your agent is calling). Shang-Chi’s first indication that he is living a destiny that has more in mind for him than being a valet parker all his life comes when a bus he and Kate are riding home from work (it’s indicative of the class divide in this movie that two people who park cars for a living can’t afford cars of their own) is hijacked by a hit squad sent by Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu) – maybe it was just because I was watching this with a group from Bears San Diego, but I found him the sexiest guy in the movie, a lot hotter than the reasonably cute but small, wiry and rather nondescript Simu Liu – who are after the magical pendant Shang-Chi always wears. Apparently Shang-Chi’s father Xu (ya remember Xu?) needs to steal that pendant, and the matching one worn by Shang-Chi’s sister Xialing, to regain the immortality and super-powers he lost when he married Ying (an interesting inversion of the tiresome series of movies Charles and I watched at Landmark Theatres preview screenings in the early 2000’s, in which in order for the heroine to get laid, something bad had to happen to one of her kids).

So he’s sent Razor Fist (so called because he has a glowing metallic sword that he can screw on the end of his arm to replace his missing hand) and his team of thugs to hijack the bus on which Shang-Chi and Kate are traveling, and there’s a scene straight out of the movie Speed in which the good guys and the bad guys fight for control of the bus (with the regular passengers basically becoming collateral damage) and, after the bad guys off the bus driver (though it’s not clear whether they actually killed him or just pushed him off the bus), first Shang-Chi and then Katy take over (a bit of classic Hollywood-era “planting” – they drive for a living, so naturally they can handle a runaway bus) and ultimately they get off the bus safely, though the bad guys get Shang-Chi’s pendant. Then Shang-Chi insists he has to go to Macao to find his sister – only he gets tricked into signing a contract to fight in her arena and finds that she’s actually his opponent. Then Razor Fist and his minions come in and wreck the place, and there’s a vertiginous action sequence in which Shang-Chi and Kate have to rappel down the side of the building just as it’s collapsing (that’s becoming an annoying cliché in modern-day action films, but it’s still exciting). Eventually Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing agree to make common cause and track down their father, though in the process of the big fight she’s lost her pendant (ya remember the pendants?). They’re taken prisoner and held in a forest of animate trees, but fortunately they meet up with an actor named Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley – an odd choice for what amounts to a comic-relief role) who has a pet, a winged pig-like creature who guides them so Shang-Chi and Katy can drive their stolen car out of the animate forest and to the relative safety of their mom’s magic city – whose biosphere, both animal and plant, makes it look like they took a wrong turn and ended up in Avatar’s Pandora.

Unfortunately, first they have to convince the people running Ta Lo that they’re good and not out to destroy it, and then they have to mobilize to fight Xu and his minions, who have been lured there by the voice of Xu’s dead wife Li (Shang-Chi’s and Xialing’s mother). The voice is allegedly coming from behind a series of gates lined with eggs containing Soul-Destroyers, nasty creatures who look like mini-dragons and can literally suck the souls out of living people to sustain themselves. (If the late Bela Lugosi had been around to see this movie, he’d have probably thought, “Damn! All I ever got to suck was blood!”) Xu releases these creatures, but fortunately Shang-Chi has a way to defend the city against them: a giant creature referred to as a dragon but, because it has no wings, it’s more like a sea serpent. It can fly, but there’s no indication of what gives it lift (but then there wasn’t with Superman either!). This creature emerges just in the nick of time to allow the city to defend itself against the giant dragon (this one winged and looking more like the popular conception of a dragon) all the Soul-Destroyers have merged into. We’re told that if the Soul-Destroyer can suck out the soul of the good sea-serpent, it will be unstoppable, and so the dragon has to be killed – only the one way to kill it is with an arrow directly aimed at its throat, and Kate, even though she’d never fired a bow and arrow in her life until she got to the secret city and went through a quick training program, gets to be a regular Katniss Everdeen and hits the dragon dead-on in the throat after the dragon has clutched Xu and, in one of the film’s coolest effects, literally melted him away in mid-air. Before that, of course, there’s the scene in which the hero realizes that the villain he’s been after is his own father – a bit that’s become trite since Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader – and it looks like the world in general and that hidden city in particular have been saved for niceness again. Only [spoiler alert!] while Shang-Chi acquires the Ten Rings of Power and he and Katy pair off, his sister Xialing, in a plot twist I could definitely have done without, takes over the Ten Rings cult and decides to continue its evil agenda. (Well, they had to set up a sequel somehow.)

In the Los Angeles Times article I cited above, Justin Chang said, “There’s probably some cultural subtext in there about intergenerational shame and not embarrassing yourself in front of your elders and influences,” which is true – but I’d emphasize that word “probably” because anyone who was hoping that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would be the breakthrough movie for Asian superheroes the way Black Panther was for Black superheroes will be disappointed. Black Panther was a brilliant film that used the superhero genre and the Marvel Cinematic Universe whose director, Ryan Coogler, and his writing partner Joe Robert Cole used the form to make serious social, political and philosophical statements about the relationship between oppressed people and the oppressors, how the oppressed should fight back, what responsibility – if any – do a remote population entrusted with a great resources have to the rest of the world, and also a direct challenge to one of the foundational assumptions of anti-Black racism: the idea that Black people never built an advanced civilization and therefore their history as “savages” in Africa justified their enslavement here. (I still vividly remember reading one of the first Black-history books that challenged that myth – in my high-school library I got out a volume about the ancient empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay, which included the fact that in the 13th century the largest library in the world was at the University of Timbuktu – though virtually all its books were in Arabic: the indigenous languages of sub-Saharan Africa were not written down and Arabic served as the lingua franca of African scholars the way Latin did in Europe.)

Instead the makers of Shang-Chi – director Destin Daniel Cretton and his writing partners, Dave Callahan and Andrew Lanham (notice that none of these people are Asian – just as the two Wonder Woman films were directed by a woman but written by men, and in the first one the script had been finalized before the director was hired – and unlike Black Panther, which was made by Black people behind the camera as well as in front of it) – took the easy way out and made a typical comic-book action movie in which, especially for the first hour, the plot (such as it is) exists only to set up the action scenes. The second half gets a bit more serious about telling an actual story, but still the meat on the bones of a movie like this is spectacular action and the plot simply an excuse to get us from one big action set-piece to another. Within that framework Shang-Chi is reasonably well done – and I was gratified to see so many stunt people credited it was clear they weren’t doing it all with CGI (and apparently Simu Liu was picked for his role partly because he’s worked as a stunt person himself). But, as with the heavy-metal rock concert I’d been to at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion the day before (a tribute to Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Van Halen and Pink Floyd, none of whom rank among my favorites), for much of Shang-Chi I was enduring it more than I was being entertained by it, and I was recalling a line I remember from a Los Angeles Times review of a big action blockbuster years ago that these sorts of movies “don’t so much entertain an audience as bludgeon it into submission.”