He’s terrific at the fight choreography, but tentative in delivering his lines in English. That doesn’t get the job done, playing Dad-the-Heavy here. Leung is an actor known for understated, sublimated performances. The inclusion of a cute, headless, winged fantasy dog critter and retrieving Oscar winner Ben Kingsley from an earlier Marvel movie show that Cretton, who also did “Glass Castle” and “Short Term 12,” knew the tone to go for - light - and did his best to find it.īut the sitcom-vet leading man is seriously wooden, never showing us much in the way of range, never finding the character’s heart or funnybone. “You are a product of all who came before you…A blood debt must be repaid by blood.” The dialogue, concocted by a “WW84” scribe, writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton and his “Just Mercy” screenwriter, is thin on jokes and weak on The Wisdom of the Far East. The jokes, including a light sample of Awkwafina’s wide-eyed, profanity-punctuated gawking, are mostly low-hanging fruit, although the live-streaming bus fight is a hoot. “I don’t know what he wants with them, but we both know it can’t be good.” He and Katy must dash off to China’s pre-Vegas Vegas - Macau - track down his sister ( Meng’er Zhang) at her fight club and, after a throwdown in the ring, warn her that her amulet is on evil Dad’s mind. Sure, his fight is live-streamed by a net-lump ( Zach Cherry) helping Shaun go viral as “Bus Boy.” But the bottom line is, they stole his mother’s jade amulet. Hulking minions, including the magic-blade-armed Razor Fist ( Florian Munteanu) catch him on that bus. Now, he happily parks product-placement BMWs at a swank hotel with his joker BFF, Katy ( Awkwafina).īut the past - detailed in enchanted opening scenes showing how Xu Wenwu (Leung) met, and fought the woman ( Fala Chen) who became his wife and made him give up his never-ending search for power - catches up with Shaun. His immortal Dad trained him to fight, but Shaun fled China for San Francisco. “Kim’s Convenience” alumnus Simi Liu was tapped to play the title role, a young guy raised by his supervillain-who-settled-down Dad ( Tony Leung of “In the Mood for Love”). The air goes out of the balloon, bit by bit, through a Macau fight club and high rise scaffolding chase, and the long middle acts settle into tedium, exposition and entropy. Stunning, and fun.īut that’s pretty much the high water mark for the Marvel moments in this two-hours-plus saga. It’s a film of dazzling effects, with the psychotronic bolts and shock-waves emanating from characters’ fingers taking a back seat to some truly Next Gen level water effects, bamboo forest maze scenes, and a pull-out all the stops Spider-Man-styled battle with bad guys in a moving, articulated (two-coach) bus up and down the streets of San Francisco. “Shang Chi” allows the universe to access all sorts of Chinese folklore, legend, history and myth - as well as martial arts movie tropes. Even the in-movie winks at the Marvel “stick the superhero landing” formula have grown stale. “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is more martial arts than Marvel, and that’s a good thing.
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