So this was another MCU film that we skipped over watching in the cinema due to the pandemic and the critical response was bad enough that I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it either. I would still eventually catch it up of course and so here we are. In the event, this film features surprisingly good action choreography and the moment to moment scenes are solid as well. It suffers though from shallowly developed worldbuilding and just trying to tell too large a story. I would have been happy with a street-level kung fu movie in the MCU but I guess they really needed it to be an epic fantasy movie to justify a big studio budget.

Shang-Chi, who goes by Shaun in the US, is content being a parking valet with his friend Katy. But when he is attacked by warriors from the Ten Rings organization on a bus, he reveals his martial arts training and his past. His father is the seemingly immortal warlord Wenwu who once conquered kingdoms with his mystical ten rings. But he gave up that life when he married Ying Li who comes from a village in a hidden dimension known as Ta Lo. When Ying Li was killed after having Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing, Wenwu went back to his old life and Shang-Chi ran away after being sent on a mission to assassinate an enemy. With Katy, he goes to Macau in search for his sister as he fears their father is targeting them both. Soon enough Wenwu captures them both, saying simply that he has always kept track of where they are, and explains that he believes that Ying Li is still alive and kept prisoner in Ta Lo. He intends to pierce their defenses with the power of his rings to recover her and wants them along.

There are far too many characters and too much backstory to fit in one film. There is so little room for Xialing that one wonders why she is here at all. The final fight involves a big baddie and arguably what amounts to a deux ex machina, neither of whom have any personalities at all, with even the main characters feeling like sidekicks to the big fight. It also adds yet another hidden dimension to the MCU which feels increasingly overloaded with secret organizations, places and histories that don’t make sense at all as being part of the same universe. It’s no wonder that every once in a while, the comics feel the need to do a total reboot. In escalating from street fights to epic fantasy, the story goes so fast and takes so many turns that it’s easy to miss so many places where the story makes no sense. For example, who did send Shang-Chi the clue about his sister’s location and how did he even know that she too had left their father? How is the forest maze any kind of an obstacle in a world where superheroes and helicopters exist? Why are the Ten Rings goons so unthreatening compared to say a squad of US soldiers in full combat gear? This is a very frustrating film for someone like me who cares about consistent worldbuilding.

At the same time, the moment to moment scenes are really good. The martial arts choreography is finally as competent as anything coming out from Hong Kong or China and it’s great to see Hollywood finally making excellent making use of Chinese talent in this field. Tong Leung is of course great as Wenwu though as others have pointed out, his story is better and more complete than that of his son. I also like Shang-Chi’s relationship with Katy, being best friends with each other but not actually being together. They may or may not become boyfriend/girlfriend in the future as even Katy’s mother assumes that they will get married at some point, but it’s a novel and interesting character dynamic. Ben Kingsley’s return as the fake Mandarin provides for the requisite comic relief and it’s both genuinely funny and serves as a useful callback to less enlightened times in the comic book world. Everything looks great and it’s a really entertaining action movie, much better than I’d expected it to be.

The result is a film that is less than the sum of its parts. Worse, it’ll also go on to further pollute the consistency and tone of the wider MCU and I expect that it will be the same with Eternals. I really liked director Destin Daniel Cretton’s previous work on Short Term 12 but Marvel’s approach of hiring artistic directors really shows its limits here. No doubt they are pleased to work on these big budget commercial films for the money and to raise their own profile but it’s also evident that they have no long-term attachment to the MCU and no personal love for the characters. It’s seems that Disney is now content to approach each MCU film as one-shots with no consideration of them meshing together as part of a coherent shared universe and these arthouse directors are happy to work on them without needing to sign onto any long-term obligations. This means that while Shang-Chi makes for an acceptable action movie, it’s still pretty bad when compared to peak MCU.