One surprise of the pandemic period is how Hollywood has struggled to save the film industry. No one, necessarily, could have predicted that TV and streaming would be more nimble in facing every problem from restarting production to creating material more relevant to a sudden change in the zeitgeist... but watching big time film production both struggle to adapt to wholesale shift in media consumption while also stalwartly refusing to change preplanned future productions... well, the mind reels.
From kicking a whole bunch of film canisters down the road (I do think the world may be ready for James Bond by November) to haphazardly releasing projects to generally dismal box office, this has been a bad year for the big budget film and things are only barely looking up (and in a year when the only seeming sure thing Hollywood can agree on is... Ryan Reynolds, is that a surprise?).
Mostly, I'm dismayed that Hollywood seems to have entered this vicious circle of throwing already finished films out to see if anything hits, with no regard for where audience tastes might be, and then being surprised when nothing really hits.
And so, after watching Black Widow basically fail (and after stunning streaming audiences with the string of hits starting with Wandavision)... Marvel too is just sailing along blithely, sending out Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as if we're all just watching comic book movies and the genre isn't fast heading towards a dead end. Nice try - and to it's credit, Shang-Chi hits some fine notes in the early going - but in the end, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings offers a surprisingly stale mix of standard International Asian Legend hooey crossed with Black Panther crossed with typical third act CGI overkill, and the result is about as pedestrian as one could come to expect.
We open with some narration about an ancient Asian legend and what falls somewhere between cutting room footage from Mulan and whatever recently got made in Hong Kong or Taiwan - which is to say, ancient Chinese soldiers guarding some Forbidden City looking gate... blah blah blah. The legend is about the man who holds the "Ten Rings" - magical bracelets that have otherworldly laser power or something - and how he conquers, well, whatever he wants.
This turns out to be Tony Leung Chiu Wai and in the first fairly bravura move of storytelling, our villain is our opening narrator... and the film does a nice job of setting up a string of unreliable narration, which carries much of the first two thirds. This leads to the actual into of Shang, er, Shaun Chi, the villain's son, who is leading a mild mannered life in San Francisco as a young adult until Dad shows up to reclaim his son's birthright... or something. This leads us to Macau, where we meet Shang-Chi's sister, more fights ensue and we learn that Dad is trying to find the magical land where their mother is from to bring her back from the dead... or something.
And, much like Black Panther, for much of the early going, the mix of well executed action sequences and nods to cultural integrity play well. There's a lively sequence on San Francisco's hill streets with a bus that's very solid and the Macau sequence of a multilevel fight on the bamboo scaffolding in front of a mirrored tower is close to a visual masterpiece. But for all that setup, once we're locked into the fairly standard comic book family dynamics. Shang-Chi has almost nowhere to go, and the weariness shows. The film takes over an hour, for instance to introduce Michelle Yeoh's character and once she's in, she has almost nothing to do except motivate the kids to defend the magical hamlet that gave them their mom (her sister). From there it's the usual, over the top battle with a CGI monster that's busy with visuals, but hard to connect with emotionally. And ultimately, that's been the last 5-7 Marvel and DC pictures in a nutshell, and it's why the whole genre is starting to wear a bit thin.
Sure, Shang-Chi boasts Yeoh and a fine turn from Akwafina, as well as Simu Liu as Shang-Chi and Leung, of course, who really can convey pages of dialogue in a single look, and little here is wasted with him. But Leung's acting strength alone can't save a largely predictable, awfully pedestrian enterprise, try as he might. And ultimately, what doesn't quite carry through is either the much ballyhooed direction of Destin Daniel Cretton or the weak, much labored on, script; neither of them seem like more than the newest toys off the Marvel studio factory assembly line.
There are lessons here should Kevin Feige - or anyone else with some senior executive status - choose to look: the first being that lively post credit sequences can't save moderately entertaining films; and beyond that, the whole genre could use an infusion not of new blood so much as new approaches to telling fresh stories. Wandavision hinted at this; so did The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings just feels like Wakanda Forever in a shiny Asian dress.
Jaded? Perhaps. In many ways, in this golden age of the MCU, we've never had it so good and it may be a little unfair to expect every film to be a profound reimagining of what comic book movies can do (see what I did there?). Still, even in a world untouched by pandemic problems and struggles for film as a medium, it's hard to portray Shang-Chi as much more than a colour-by-numbers Mad Lib version of 3 other, better comic book films at least. That the film's weaknesses will be more apparent in a less instant boffo BO world like the one we have now doesn't mean we shouldn't look harder at this Marvel revolving door of machinery like film production over livelier, more risky creative swings. It's a little too easy to imagine what a better, smarter, more creatively adventurous Shang-Chi could have been; and that's yet another not good sign for a Hollywood film business that desperately needs to get ahead of their problems, not fall to them, repeatedly.
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