I've said this before about Marvel movies: they are a victim of their own success. "Shang-Chi" had to follow up a decade and a half of quality MCU movies, so the same movie that would've been a smash 10 years ago isn't viewed quite the same today. The movie was good, but it failed to really separate itself.
"The Legend of Ten Rings" as a title already sounds too much like LOTR. And in fact it was something like it in that he with the rings had the power. Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung) had the ten rings which gave him near omnipotence. With the ten rings he could defeat entire armies and live forever. He decided to use the rings to become a tyrant.
He was willing to put his rings aside and grow old for the love of his life, a woman he found after living 1000 years. I thought it was a bit strange that it took the man 1000 years to find his true love, but I didn't dwell on it.
Stranger than him taking a thousand years to find his true love was the woman who fell in love with him. She lived in a secret magical village in Macao that was totally isolated from the rest of the world. She was a gentle benign character who had powers herself and was able to defeat Wenwu when he came to essentially conquer her village. Somehow, through their Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-esque battle they fell in love. Maybe that makes sense for him being that he finally found someone who could defeat him, but it didn't make sense for this nearly pure woman to fall for a man with a 1000 year history of tyranny.
Still, they wed, forsook their powers and started a family.
Their family would be unceremoniously destroyed when an old foe of Wenwu--a vicious gang--came by their house to get their pound of flesh and killed Wenwu's wife, Li (Fala Chen). Li could've attempted to barter with them for some sort of material exchange for their past losses, but instead she immediately decided she'd try to fight the entire gang and lost her life in the process. That would cause Wenwu to don the ten rings again and return to tyranny.
So, if you're keeping score on Wenwu's wife, 1.) she was smitten with a man who came to destroy her village and 2.) she chose to fight an entire gang with no powers to speak of and with no attempts to negotiate.
I recognize that it was a plot device to advance the plot, but it could've been done a lot better and with more tact. Her character never struck me as someone impulsive and/or not able to judge character yet she exhibited both flaws.
Most of what I've covered was garnered throughout the movie via flashbacks. The real main character was Saun aka Shang-Chi (Simu Liu). He was the son of Wenwu and Li. Years later we see an adult Saun. He lives in SF and is a valet. He is violently thrust back into the life he ran away from when his father's goons came for the pendant around his neck given to him by his mother. It was at this point we learned his backstory, of which I've given some already. We find out he also has a sister, Xialing (Meng'er Zhang), who Disney not so subtly informed us she had to train herself to become a fierce warrior because of her gender. The two of them had been split up for close to twenty years when Saun ran away after being trained to be an assassin by his father. He was fourteen at the time and she was ten when he promised her he'd be back. He never came back and when they met again in Macao as adults she held the same ten-year-old bitterness against him for running away as though a fourteen-year-old should've been more reliable. She greeted him with a butt-kicking that was twenty years in the making. It's clear that it never crossed her mind that he may have been killed, or maybe she would've considered his death a betrayal as well. Either way it was a completely childish way to handle reuniting with your long lost brother.
The two of them would join forces along with Saun's friend Katy (Awkwafina) and really quickly to stop their father. He was going to use the ten rings to breach a portal to another dimension which contained some soul-sucking demons.
The introduction of demons to the movie did offer some excitement. It upped the stakes of everyone involved and thrust another Marvel character into the role of saving the world.
Saun would save the world with the help of his friends and family. Some would die, but the most important characters lived. I was somewhat satisfied with the movie. The acting was commendable and Awkwafina was good as the comic relief. "Shang-Chi" may just be the placement of a singular brick to build to something bigger, I just hope what Marvel is building towards is worth it.
"The Legend of Ten Rings" as a title already sounds too much like LOTR. And in fact it was something like it in that he with the rings had the power. Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung) had the ten rings which gave him near omnipotence. With the ten rings he could defeat entire armies and live forever. He decided to use the rings to become a tyrant.
He was willing to put his rings aside and grow old for the love of his life, a woman he found after living 1000 years. I thought it was a bit strange that it took the man 1000 years to find his true love, but I didn't dwell on it.
Stranger than him taking a thousand years to find his true love was the woman who fell in love with him. She lived in a secret magical village in Macao that was totally isolated from the rest of the world. She was a gentle benign character who had powers herself and was able to defeat Wenwu when he came to essentially conquer her village. Somehow, through their Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-esque battle they fell in love. Maybe that makes sense for him being that he finally found someone who could defeat him, but it didn't make sense for this nearly pure woman to fall for a man with a 1000 year history of tyranny.
Still, they wed, forsook their powers and started a family.
Their family would be unceremoniously destroyed when an old foe of Wenwu--a vicious gang--came by their house to get their pound of flesh and killed Wenwu's wife, Li (Fala Chen). Li could've attempted to barter with them for some sort of material exchange for their past losses, but instead she immediately decided she'd try to fight the entire gang and lost her life in the process. That would cause Wenwu to don the ten rings again and return to tyranny.
So, if you're keeping score on Wenwu's wife, 1.) she was smitten with a man who came to destroy her village and 2.) she chose to fight an entire gang with no powers to speak of and with no attempts to negotiate.
I recognize that it was a plot device to advance the plot, but it could've been done a lot better and with more tact. Her character never struck me as someone impulsive and/or not able to judge character yet she exhibited both flaws.
Most of what I've covered was garnered throughout the movie via flashbacks. The real main character was Saun aka Shang-Chi (Simu Liu). He was the son of Wenwu and Li. Years later we see an adult Saun. He lives in SF and is a valet. He is violently thrust back into the life he ran away from when his father's goons came for the pendant around his neck given to him by his mother. It was at this point we learned his backstory, of which I've given some already. We find out he also has a sister, Xialing (Meng'er Zhang), who Disney not so subtly informed us she had to train herself to become a fierce warrior because of her gender. The two of them had been split up for close to twenty years when Saun ran away after being trained to be an assassin by his father. He was fourteen at the time and she was ten when he promised her he'd be back. He never came back and when they met again in Macao as adults she held the same ten-year-old bitterness against him for running away as though a fourteen-year-old should've been more reliable. She greeted him with a butt-kicking that was twenty years in the making. It's clear that it never crossed her mind that he may have been killed, or maybe she would've considered his death a betrayal as well. Either way it was a completely childish way to handle reuniting with your long lost brother.
The two of them would join forces along with Saun's friend Katy (Awkwafina) and really quickly to stop their father. He was going to use the ten rings to breach a portal to another dimension which contained some soul-sucking demons.
The introduction of demons to the movie did offer some excitement. It upped the stakes of everyone involved and thrust another Marvel character into the role of saving the world.
Saun would save the world with the help of his friends and family. Some would die, but the most important characters lived. I was somewhat satisfied with the movie. The acting was commendable and Awkwafina was good as the comic relief. "Shang-Chi" may just be the placement of a singular brick to build to something bigger, I just hope what Marvel is building towards is worth it.