Shang – Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Spoiler Free
Shang – Chi is the second of four Marvel movies slated to be released this year. Given the long hiatus of Marvel content, and movies in general, I was very excited to see this movie, even more so after Black Widow exceeded my expectations. Like most Marvel films, Shang – Chi keeps up a light-hearted tone to make the movie entertaining, but also has enough emotional depth to give the film more meaning. The chemistry between Shang and his best friend Katy feels genuine and the way they play off of each other is very entertaining. On the other hand, the relationships between Shang and his family provide a lot of emotion, meaning that Shang – Chi already feels like a fully fleshed out character with a likeable nature and fully explored motivations/backstory.
The action, especially in the first half, is top notch. The film includes a lot of steady shots so that the audience can see all of the action and stunt work, but it isn’t done in a way that feels like it’s trying to be artsy or that distracts from the movie. Later on, the movie moves a bit farther away from the martial-arts style combat and what they replace it with doesn’t make for as good of fight scenes, but it’s still good. Also, atypically for a lot of Marvel films, the main villain was good. I won’t give away their identity (though I assume anyone watching the film could figure it out pretty quickly), but they had an actually interesting backstory motivation to their character, and the connection they had with Shang added more weight to the conflict. While I wouldn’t rank them as high as say, Killmonger, Thanos or Loki in terms of MCU villains, they’re easily in the upper half.
I only have two complaints with the film. The first is that there are a lot of flashbacks in the movie. While none of them feel completely unnecessary, it does slow the movie down at times, especially since there’s quite a few scenes of exposition. Not really forced exposition, but the movie does spend a good portion of its run-time discussing or showing things that happened in the past. My other complaint is in regards to the third act, which does kind of drag, just because it’s a very long battle at the end that probably didn’t need to be that long. But aside from a few pacing issues, I don’t have any real problems with the movie.
Like Black Widow, it exceeded my expectations, and ranks as one of the best origin story films in the MCU. Obviously, there’s stiff competition in the MCU for being one of the best of those movies, but Shang – Chi is definitely another really strong installment in the franchise.
Recommendation: Watch
Comments