The success of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which was directed by indie filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12 ), is that it manages to do everything expected of it: set up a new and, for many, not terribly familiar (or, because of dated stereotypes, not always fondly remembered) superhero break free of those aforementioned stereotypes by giving the cultural legacies at its center a little weight satisfy audiences so used to the usual hero-journey theatrics of origin stories that phoning it in with “the usual” just won’t cut it anymore. Inevitably, someone wants to unleash great evil upon the world, and someone else wakes up one day to realize that it’s his fate, responsibility, and chore to be the guy who stops the other guy.
(Frodo just had the one, and it was enough of a pain in the ass.)
#Power of ten rings movie#
The promise of Shang-Chi, which is as much martial-arts movie as it is standard superhero origin fare, is that a lot of people will get their asses kicked: sometimes gracefully, even beautifully, and other times with the battering-ram power you can expect of a movie advertising 10 rings at play. Put the likes of Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung in a movie, on the other hand, and attach it to a kung-fu superhero, and my needs adjust accordingly. be a wise-ass for two hours if he has to do it from behind a mask for a few scenes, so be it. I do actually go to an Iron Man movie wanting to see Robert Downey Jr. This is saying a lot for a movie that does have a hefty dose of backstory to plow through, being a cross-generational, culture-forward origin story and family drama - a narrative with heavy lifts on the exposition front and a heap of traps to avoid on the cultural front.īut this is also as it should be. Someone will have to do the actual math (and I don’t doubt that someone will), but if Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t the most action-oriented movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far - purely in terms of ratio of time spent watching people beat each other up to time spent vamping in the interim - it has to rank somewhere near the top.