Revealing Character in Shang-Chi

I’ve been trying to write a Shang-Chi review for like over a week and keep struggling to find an angle.

For one, everything that could be said has already been said. Shang-Chi is, in a lot of ways, an MCU masterclass. It’s one of the most fun and kinetic films the Marvel brand has put out in years. It’s also one of the most heartfelt. In a lot of ways, my main struggle in approaching Shang-Chi is that a proper review of the movie would just be repeating the things I said in my last article about Black Widow and The Suicide Squad – this one focuses on character drama, and it absolutely excels at it. There, I did it, I did the Shang-Chi review, let’s wrap it up.

Okay, but really. Shang-Chi is a fun case example because there are a lot of things it succeeds at, with a few notable failures, too. I don’t want to talk about those failures just yet – a lot of my problems with this movie stem from the ending, and so those will get their own spoiler-y discussion post. For this one, I mostly wanted to do with a lot of my basic reviews, which is to pitch the overall movie and what works about it. If there’s anything about this movie that puts it above its peers, it’s how it excels at revealing character. In doing so, it creates a cast that’s a lot more memorable than some MCU casts. When the MCU was first branching out from its core group, it really leaned on using humour to bridge some of the gaps of ‘realism.’ Comedy built our suspension of disbelief. This really worked for a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy, and to an extent, Ant-Man. But this comedy became a sort of crutch, and eventually, you get to Doctor Strange, which is practically falling over itself with how much it's deflating its own seriousness. Doctor Strange is a weird character, but by trying to ground the weirdness in a sort of self-aware irony can hurt otherwise fun concepts. Shang-Chi, however, steers pretty far away from this phenomenon. Unlike Tony Stark, or Peter Parker, Star-Lord, or a half-dozen other MCU heroes, Xu Shang-Chi isn’t really a quippy lead. He’s not smarmy or sarcastic or anything like that. Not that those qualities are intrinsically bad, but we’ve done that a lot, and Simu Liu’s performance here is kind of refreshingly honest in contrast. Shang-Chi is just a good-natured guy trying to live his life on his own terms, but life has fully interrupted him.

But for real, though, this scene is maybe one of the top 10 scenes in the MCU? Ever?

See, as we learn in the opening, Shang-Chi’s father is Xu Wenwu, “The Mandarin,” an immortal conqueror who wields the mystical Ten Rings. He sets his ways aside when he meets and falls in love with Shang-Chi’s mother, Ying Li. The first real fight we see in the movie is the first meeting between Wenwu and Li. Wenwu is here to get through Li and to her mystical village, his fighting style is rough and powerful. Li’s style, in contrast, is smooth and graceful, open-palmed, and she routinely turns Wenwu’s vicious assault against himself. It’s a brief scene, but it fully sells their relationship – Li as the gentle force that tampers Wenwu’s violence and aggression and turns him into a family man. When people praise the combat in this movie, this above all else is what’s being praised. Sure, the fighting all looks and feels fantastic, but more than that, every fight scene reveals character. The opening fight between Li and Wenwu not only depicts their relationship, it sets up the sort of trajectory Wenwu will have, and also gives us everything we need to know for Shang-Chi’s arc. He’s a man of split parentage, of split identity. War and peace. We find him in San Francisca, trying to run away from both lineages, but he will eventually have to face them and find synthesis.

She's so cool, please put her in every Marvel movie.

This is a fun movie to talk about because, at its best, everything feeds back into itself. As its unwinding the present-day plot, we’re slowly filling in the context from Shang-Chi’s past through very well-paced flashbacks. It’s reminiscent of Batman Begins, where we’re slowly piecing together the psyche of this hero as we’re following his emotional journey. These flashbacks aren’t just here to fill us in on the important details, but to place us into the headspace of the characters. Take our introduction to Shang-Chi’s sister, Xu Xialing (who is phenomenal, by the way. This is Meng’er Zhang’s first mainstream film role and she absolutely kills it, even among all-time greats like Tony Leung). Shang-Chi has come to this crazy fighting ring looking to save his sister, and lo and behold, she’s here in the pit fighting him. And just as the audience is thinking, “hold on, why is she on the attack here?” we travel back to her childhood, watching vital context play out from her perspective. Everything in this movie is personal, Shang-Chi really understands the way present-day actions flow from past subtext. And so there’s this sense of stream-of-consciousness un-linearity to it, shifting back and forth from Shang-Chi’s childhood to the impact that has on his present. This is the sort of thing Captain Marvel should have been doing, and it works great here.

This movie is also very pretty? It has some genuinely cool framing going on.

What’s so nice about this is that we don’t need Shang-Chi to be a fun, quippy guy in order for him to be likeable. We’re thrust into the depths of his family drama, and we get to see it from enough angles that he, his sister, and his father all become complex characters who are interesting to watch. Everyone has years of history and resentment that are crashing against each other, and that’s compelling. It helps that it’s all anchored by Tony Leung as Wenwu, who adds so much weight and gravitas to this whole dynamic. He’s easily one of Marvel’s best villains. It’s kind of funny in retrospect because you see characters like Ronan who are just there to be intimidating but have very little psychology going on behind them. Wenwu works because we know him. He’s terrifying because we know exactly what motivates him and how far he will go to get it, and because we kind of relate. By the time we meet him in the movie, he’s not that bad of a guy. He’s not after the end of the world or anything like that. But his methods are extreme, and he is ruthlessly determined, and the shadow he’s cast over his children’s lives had blotted out everything. And that’s a really fun dynamic to see play out.

It's just good to see a narrative that’s littered with genuine character choices. Choice, after all, defines characters. A major player in this movie is Katy, played by Awkwafina. When she first appeared in trailers, I was nervous that she was just going to be a comic relief stand-in, and little more. But that’s not true! Katy, just like everyone here, feels like a living, fleshed-out character. Towards the beginning of the movie, when the Call interrupts Shang-Chi’s life and he sets off on an adventure, Katy inserts herself into the narrative with him. There are any number of ways you could have had Katy join Shang-Chi, but here she simply sticks her ground, says, “You’re my friend, I’m coming with you on this one,” and marches along. She’s determined and headstrong, and while she feels aimless in life, that just means she has nothing to lose. Katy could easily have just been a throwaway sidekick character, but instead, she has enough life to be a valuable member of the party. Everyone works in this movie.

I'm so excited to see what Marvel does with these characters. Hopefully they're able to sustain them without dropping the things that make them so solid.

I feel like I’m saying a lot at this point, but I think that’s why I’ve struggled for so long to write this piece. Because you can’t really talk about any individual piece of Shang-Chi without reaching towards the whole. And that means it’s a really good, and cohesive movie! But it also means it’s hard to talk about without just “spoiling” the whole thing and getting into all the synthesis in the ending and whether that works or not. Mostly, by the way, it does! All the family dynamic stuff locks into place and is very, very solid. It’s for that reason that I love this movie so much. Because again, we don’t need our hero to be quippy or fun for us to want to follow his journey. His journey just needs to be compelling. And this movie really gets that. It gets that more than a lot of these movies do, and I generally like these movies.

Mostly, this movie excited me because it’s a real display of what Marvel is capable of as it moves properly into its fourth phase. It’s weird because up until now, Phase 4 has been a lot of established characters considering their own legacies. And, Shang-Chi as a character definitely falls into that as well. But while a lot of the Disney+ shows have been about established characters finding new identities for themselves, and Black Widow was about a… dead character establishing an identity for herself, Shang-Chi is our first step into what will be fresh about this side of the MCU. So far, the answer seems to be deep, rich characters with really interesting stories that engage in a whole new world. Moreover, it’s an MCU that’s willing to move away from established hits and into “riskier” waters. Namely, away from the typical white leads and into embracing a more diverse team. Something like a third of this movie is spoken in Mandarin, which is really cool? Not to mention just how much it takes up Chinese folklore without any explanation or dumbing-down for the audience. I don’t know, this one was just a breath of fresh air. It makes me very excited to see what Chloe Zhao is going to do for The Eternals. My only wish for the future of the MCU was that it got weird and exciting, and so far, I feel like I’m getting my wish.

Jon Jon is in this movie for like, five minutes? But is as likeable and believable as the rest of this cast. Shang-Chi just does it right.

All that to say, Shang-Chi is really good. You didn’t need me to tell you that, everyone was already telling you that. But I’m confirming it. Shang-Chi is exactly the sort of thing I want Marvel to be making – movies that are bold and adventurous (literally adventurous, there’s a chunk of this movie that feels like it's riding on Indiana Jones’ coattails and I love it) while also giving us honest and vulnerable characters. I love it, it’s a blast. Go see it if you can do so safely.