Shang Chi, High in the Sky
There’s a specific pleasure which comes from watching movies on a long flight.
Many of the movies on offer are hard to find on streaming platforms and even if they are easily accessible, may not feel as attractive as they are when the viewer sits secluded in the sky, doomed to discomfort (unless that viewer is sitting in business class, of course). On a 12 hour flight in November of 2023, I settled into my aisle seat for a viewing of Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a 2021 film that marks the 25th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). I’m not an avid MCU fan but recognize that the franchise has, at this point, mostly cornered the market on the 21st century superhero genre. High in the sky, I indulged in this monopoly and began considering the ways in which this film distinguishes itself from the other entries in the sprawling, Disney-owned multiverse.
The first set of scenes provide an extended flashback sequence explaining the Ten Rings and their owner’s connection to the enchanted land of Ta Lo. The only memorable part of this exercise is the fight scene between Shang Chi’s parents; this beautiful, wuxia-style tussle is a dance that isn’t weighed down by poor use of CGI, unlike so many Marvel properties. After the fight ends, Shang-Chi and Awkwafina spend the first 20 or so minutes of the present day setting establishing their characters (i.e. wasting our time) in San Francisco, until the entertaining fight on a city trolley kicks off the film in earnest. After journeying to Macau, finding/fighting Shang Chi’s sister, and being captured by the owner of the Ten Rings, the film’s trajectory becomes clear. Xu Wenwu (played by Tony Leung), father of the two central characters and the main character in the initial flashback scene, is characterized as both transparent and delusional. Thanks to well-drawn motivations revealed through flashbacks, this character constitutes a solid villain for our heroes. From this meeting onwards, the entertaining martial arts-based fight scenes give way to some of the movie’s core issues, issues which define my experience of the movie.
Shang-Chi runs into a few problems early on, chief among which is that the characters and their millennia-long saga feel disconnected from the wider MCU. This is a startling departure compared to most Marvel outings, many of which spend time weaving in other elements of other stories from other shows and movies. Though Shang-Chi includes a brief cameo from Benedict Wong’s character Wong, the disconnect remains palpable throughout. When the movie ends, our next question should be what’s next for Shang-Chi; since the movie aired three years ago, Marvel has not answered that question and doesn’t seem intent on doing so. I wonder if it would even be worth getting an answer in the form of another standalone movie.
In Shang Chi, the film’s main character is also its blandest. Played by Simu Liu, the audience is taught throughout the movie that Shang Chi has difficulty with self expression because he is full of turmoil related to his mother’s death and father’s violent ways. Even as he seemingly figures this out over the course of the film, I’m not sure that Shang Chi ever becomes a more self-aware, and therefore interesting person. Shang Chi’s sister, played by Meng’er Zhang, is relegated to the role of Asian martial arts baddie and denied the spotlight she likely deserves. Despite this treatment, Zhang’s Xu Xialing is still one of the more dynamic and entertaining characters in the film. Xu Xialing stands in marked contrast to Awkwafina’s character, a San Francisco Chinatown-native named Katy, who is hardly a worthy or useful sidekick. As usual with western takes on eastern stories, the main characters are stalwart, noble, and deliver their dialogue woodenly; hence, a character like Katy is brought in to cut the tension. Her comedic relief, the most important reason for her continued presence, is mostly unfunny, while the small recaps and exposition she provides just feel like bloat. In this story, Katy is to Mushu what Shang-Chi is to Mulan; unlike Mushu, very few of Katy’s lines result in tangible comedic relief.
The high volume of BMW product placement provides the real comedy, with Ben Kingsley’s character providing slightly less but still serviceable humor. I learned after watching the film that Kingsley reprises this role from Iron Man 3, one of the MCU’s more forgettable installments. As an interpreter for the headless but cute creature Morris, Kingsley’s main role takes place during what is essentially a car chase scene set in the enchanted forest protecting the magical land of Ta Lo. This scene, meant to be harrowing, is classic Marvel; at one point, one character even says “we’re not going to make it”, a moment of complete low-stakes flatness given that the movie will end should the characters fail to, in fact, make it. After silly sequences like this, I wonder how the writers think audiences will react to a slightly different formula than that which they never tire of employing, something which we will likely never know.
After making it to Ta Lo and marveling at the beautiful setting that we immediately feel will be destroyed, the main characters, including Katy, are greeted by the entire village wearing blue, yellow, teal, and chartreuse robes of an Asian persuasion. Michelle Yeoh then greets them; naturally, in a movie obsessed with family and lineage, she introduces herself as their auntie and proceeds to introduce the Dweller In Darkness, this film’s true big bad. The Dweller’s agents, it’s revealed, are masquerading as Shang Chi’s dead mother and deceiving Xu Wenwu into freeing them using the Ten Rings. Yeoh’s character, like Xu Xialing, is also assigned a stock character role of wise Asian matriarch plus baddie. Unsurprisingly, Yeoh excels in this undemanding role, demonstrating her skill to Shang-Chi as the village prepares for its invasion by the Ten Rings. We also are treated to a flashback of Shang Chi’s mother dying at the hands of revenge-driven thugs while her formerly all-powerful husband is away. Yet another parental figure dying in service to the main character’s motivations; this really is a Disney movie. After exacting revenge in front of a traumatized Shang Chi, the flashback ends with Shang Chi resolving that he must pay a blood debt by killing his father. Given that his father’s actions caused the death of his mother, Shang Chi’s logic is sound and Liu’s anger during the subsequent battle scene is well executed, marking one of the few times the actor really delivers.
Speaking of the battle, it’s first phase ends with the Ten Rings soldiers joining the citizens of Ta Lo against the small bat-dragons that serve the Dweller in Darkness, who has easily manipulated the grief stricken owner of the Ten Rings into freeing it. Shang Chi, unconscious in the water, remembers his mother’s supposed wisdom that he has nothing to fear. This realization inexplicably allows him to awaken a dragon that he rides into battle. How he becomes the most worthy character to awaken and ride this beast is completely baffling and reinforces the prioritization of men over women in a film which initially suggested that the audience should judge Shang Chi’s father for prioritizing his son over his daughter. Apparently, being told by the memory of his mother that he shouldn’t be afraid not only made Shang Chi worthy of riding the dragon; it also made him a better fighter somehow, perhaps even better than a sister who has probably kept up her training better than he has given that she ran an underground fighting ring while he worked as a valet.
As the battle progresses, the dragon acknowledges Xu Xialing, recognition which is hardly equivalent to the subsequent scene in which Shang Chi takes control of five of the rings before using them to battle his father. After being hit slightly harder than before, he then takes control of all of the rings and proceeds to set them aside. Luckily for Shang Chi, he no longer has to make the difficult choice of whether or not to kill Xu Wenwu, as the Dweller in Darkness frees itself and proceeds to literally suck the rainbow out of the Ten Rings’ original owner. The two dragons then do battle in a solid sequence before Shang Chi joins Xu Xialing astride the good dragon. Hope, however, is tenuous at best, as it seems as though the Dweller is about to overwhelm its assailants.
Somehow, the battle hinges on a hero moment for Awkwafina’s Katy. In a feat of archery that can only be compared with those accomplished by the infinitely more seasoned Hawkeye, she distracts the Dweller and allows the good dragon, Shang Chi, and Xu Xialing to take down the beast for good. Naturally, it’s Shang Chi’s mastery of the Ten Rings that ends the battle. The movie ends with a solid comedic moment in which Stephanie Hsu returns with the most convincing performance of them all. She’s in disbelief that her two loser friends have been called upon to “save the world” and honestly, so am I. By virtue of his father’s rings, his mother’s vague wisdom, his sister’s undeserved status as a sidekick, and his friend’s lucky shot, Shang Chi becomes a hero. If Shang Chi’s message is that it takes a (literal and metaphorical) village, then message has definitely been received.
From left to right: Martial arts baddie (played by Meng’er Zhang), boring bro armed with nepotism (played by Simu Liu), and unfunny sidekick (played by Awkwafina)
When I selected this movie on the flight from Washington-Dulles to Doha, I sought an action movie with fun fight scenes, compelling conflict, and perhaps with something to say about… something. I was satisfied by what I saw, and even if I was disappointed by the film’s failings, I still felt like I got what I paid for. The issues I mention lingered briefly in my mind, hence this piece. True, it’s refreshing that this installment of the MCU did not indulge in its usual over-reliance on cameos, but there are other ways to tie in this film that would have lessened the disconnect it has with the rest of the franchise. The Ten Rings themselves exist in a vacuum; are they connected at all to any other powerful objects the MCU loves to trot out at varying intervals? I guess not. If they are, I’m sure we’ll learn that in future media. This type of disconnect makes the chances for continuing a story rife with solid Asian characters seem slim compared with the inevitable future installments we’ll get for heroes like Spider-Man.
It’s worth mentioning how this MCU entry functions as a more diverse entry into a franchise that has only recently begun to care about diversity. Shang Chi is, it must be stated, an achievement owing simply to the high volume of Asian American and Asian actors and characters, as well as the sheer amount of Mandarin used. There is also a significant dearth of non-Asian actors used. Even in Black Panther, two key characters, played by Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis, are white; that’s one more than this film has in the form of Ben Kingsley, who is actually just a white-presenting half-white, half-Indian English actor. Credit where credit is due, though some aspects of the film, namely Ta Lo, lean a bit too heavily on stereotype.
While the film rarely feels like Marvel is specifically pandering to Chinese, and by extension East Asian, populations both in the US and abroad, the image presented of Ta Lo does feel like another cop-out portrayal of what East Asia is imagined to be, rather than what it is. Ta Lo is a premodern, reductionist fantasy: untouched by the effects of the Industrial Revolution, magical but not visibly so, and inhabited by individuals living out a seemingly harmonious, spiritual, and pastoral ideal. Stock notions of “Eastern philosophies” built on Taoism, Buddhism, and even Confucian filial piety, are employed throughout the film in a mostly inoffensive manner, but the emphasis on the secluded purity of Ta Lo and its people is a direct product of the many Western-made movies’ legacies in which East Asian characters and settings are shown as bastions of spiritual enlightenment and inner peace. One of my favorite films, The Last Samurai, employs this to profound effect. I don’t think I can say the same for Shang Chi. And yes, Ta Lo is supposed to be a magical land divorced from our reality. That being said, it seems highly unlikely that the inhabitants of a land living under constant threat from an evil dragon would really be as serene as those in Ta Lo.
The issue of women’s roles in relation to those of men also hangs over my perception of this film. On one hand, the viewer is supposed to balk at Xu Wenwu’s misogyny towards his daughter while on the other, that same daughter grows up with no discernible difference in skill, potential, or quality from her brother. By chance, Xu Xialing still finds herself less powerful than Shang-Chi. While I understand that the source material for the film involves Shang-Chi, not his sister, harnessing the Ten Rings’ power, the attempt to elevate his sister to equal status before seemingly abandoning that attempt at the end of the movie feel like a cop out rather than the fully fleshed out arc it could have been. The arc’s reliance on chance does the character, and by extension the film, a disservice.
Over-reliance on chance also renders Katy’s character arc almost nonexistent. Throughout the film, Awkwafina’s character bemoans her family’s stance towards her apparent waywardness, sloth, and lack of motivation. Then, by chance, she acts as the linchpin for the Dweller In Darkness’s defeat. The movie hardly contends that Katy suddenly became the second-best archer in the MCU (or third? I haven’t seen Hawkeye so don’t know if Hailee Steinfeld’s character Kate is all that good… also, Katy and Kate are the MCU’s two archers now?); instead, the film purports that because Katy has good intentions and seeks to be helpful, fate guides her arrow towards its target. This is the opposite of the issue Xu Xialing faces. Instead of chance undermining a female character’s skill when that same character deserves better, chance now serves to boost an unskilled female character’s prowess when she likely deserves less. By the end of the film, it’s unclear to me how Katy’s character has truly progressed. Unless she has become a master archer, I fail to understand how she can feel as satisfied with herself as she seems to be when confronted by Stephanie Hsu’s character in the film’s final scene.
Finally, the film suffers from being part of the MCU. Yes, I know I mention that Shang-Chi feels disconnected from the rest of the films, but in this case I refer more to the patterns and tropes relied upon in the film rather than it’s role in the context of other films. The drive to Ta Lo, mentioned above, is just one example of a boring scene which most viewers know can only end one way. Other such issues rear their heads; the fact that very few of the heroes ever seem to be in existential danger, or the fact that an MCU-favorite cage match between Shang-Chi and Xu Xialing is staged solely to bring them back together, all speak to my weariness towards these films. People loved Thor: Ragnarok because it turned some of the audiences’ expectations on their heads. People loved WandaVision and Loki for similar reasons, and people will continue to enjoy Marvel media that breaks the mold both stylistically and narratively, deploys villains with credible motivations, and empowers women in well-rounded fashion. Of these three qualities, Shang-Chi only produces a decent villain in the form of the titular character’s father, one who isn’t even the film’s main antagonist. I’m curious to see whether Shang-Chi earns a sequel and whether that sequel can escape the shadow of its predecessor’s solid but hardly exemplary offering.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is available to stream on Disney+.
