A Review of Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

By Victoria Correa

This fall, the Marvel Cinematic Universe came out with its 25th movie: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Overall, I’d rate it a 9/10. The acting was excellent, and Marvel did amazing with the CGI and special effects as usual. The storyline and family themes were engaging and relatable. 

**Spoilers to come**
 

The movie starts out with Xu Wenwu, Shang Chi’s father. The screenplay and producers did a great job of concisely depicting his origin story. We see how he found the 10 rings that gave him power unlike any other. The movie depicted an accurate representation of what happens when one human has too much power — they get power hungry. Wenwu destroys countless civilizations and lives for 1000 years, but he is stopped when he reaches the land of Ta-Lo. There, he is defeated by its guardian, Ying Li, who he ends up falling in love with. It’s pretty stereotypical to me that it took a love interest for him to stop being destructive, but this ultimately led to a happy hiatus in the movie when they settled down and started a family. On a side note, the costume designers put together a killer outfit for Ying Li’s first scene. She wore a green bamboo hat and a mask with a wide skeleton-like smile. Her green dress was fit for a warrior. 

Ying Li wasn’t a total manic pixie dream girl, but her character wasn’t that developed outside of the roles of being a wife and mother. However, I am satisfied with how her importance shifted towards the end of the movie. When Shang and his sister Xialing start training with their aunt, it is their mother’s way of battle that wins against their father and his armed forces. Her prowess was the only one who could overpower her husband’s, so with the training he had in his father’s methods and power from his mothers, Shang Chi stood a chance against his father. 

There are a lot of other family themes in this movie. Shang and Xialing grow up in their father’s compound, where Shang is trained to be a hardened warrior at his father’s wishes. We witness young Shang practicing with an assistant martial arts trainer who would hit him every time he performed a move incorrectly. Wenwu wouldn’t let his daughter Xialing learn to fight, and that is ironic because Xialing starts her own fight club, which ends up being super successful. That is where she and Shang would meet again 10 years later. That is 10 years after Shang told Xialing he would be back “in a few weeks,” but ran away and never returned home. Her reaction to seeing him 10 years later is accurate in my opinion, one where she is angered and ignores his requests to talk to her at first. They even fight in the ring of her fight club, and it’s a hilarious exaggeration of siblings not getting along. Shang’s friend Katy is a relatable character, too. She is the type of person who likes to have fun in life and would rather pursue a career she loves and not for the sake of prestige. She loves her job as a valet parker, but her parents wanted her to become a doctor. That’s stereotypical immigrant parenting right there. I like how Katy’s portrayal sends the message that it’s good to pursue your own dreams, even if your parents have other ideas. 

The action scenes in this movie were top-notch. Out of nowhere, Shang has to fight two thugs his father sent on a bus in San Francisco. That is where the plot of the movie kicks off. I genuinely wondered how I would react if I was that girl writing an essay on the bus only to suddenly be in a near-death situation and have my laptop stolen and used as a shield. Another intense fight with eye-catching visuals was the fight on the scaffolding at Xialing’s fight club. The moment when Shang almost killed his former abusive assistant martial arts trainer stood out to me in particular.

When it comes to villains, the movie made many viewers inclined to sympathize with Xu Wenwu. Tony Leung did an amazing job portraying him. That is partly because viewers were later introduced to a greater villain, a soul-sucking dragon called the Dweller in Darkness. In my opinion, Wenwu still does not deserve much sympathy. But, for the sake of tugging on people’s emotions, the screen players tried to make it seem like Wenwu could not help himself from being destructive in Ta-Lo in order to try and release the dragon. (The Dweller in Darkness was faking the voice of Wenwu’s late wife in order to lure him in, and of course, people are going to sympathize with a man who misses his wife.) However, Wenwu did do something heroic before he died. He sacrificed himself and gave his son the 10 rings so he could have a chance to defeat the Dweller. Coming head-to-head with his son, Wenwu realized that he had some humanity left in him. 

It was funny how the scene cuts back to Katy and Shang having drinks with their friends who refuse to believe their story. It made for a lighthearted ending to the movie. Wong suddenly appeared through a portal to call them to an Avengers meeting, and viewers were reminded of the greater franchise that this movie is a part of.