It is becoming increasingly clear that Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has opted for a diversification of proposals that seems less concerned with responding to expectations than trying new possibilities.’Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ by Destin Daniel Cretton rescues a classic character from Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin and leads him to a story with mythological overtones not very different from what we can see today on Chinese billboards .
It is not a surprise that Marvel has chosen an oriental character to give it a unitary film, in a movement that follows the recent trend of its cinema designed for the screens of the Asian giant. If last year they tried it with ‘Mulan’ in its live action versions, this has touched ‘Stripe and the last dragon’ in its 3D animation faction and finally, now it touches the head of Marvel. The international ticket office opening code is written in Mandarin.
An amazing show of martial arts and Asian fantasy cinema
The Marvel Studios formula for a few years has been the adaptation of different genres to their own format. An atomization that tends to project your base material onto other archetypes to end up bringing everything to the same target. ‘Shang-Chi’ does not go too far out of that recipe, however, the shot is so far east that we could be talking about the film of the company furthest from its farm, showing more similar to the original model than to the usual machine factory imitation.
The operation is to use the codes of Asian entertainment cinema to fit them into the origin story of a new superhero. In this universe, being an engineering star counts as much to the point of creating suits that give powers as finding your Chi deep in a cavern to end at the same point. End up throwing rays. But on this way we have time to go through urban kung fu cinema, learn the secrets of the soul of Wuxia cinema and end up awakening mythological beings from the fantasy cinema heir to Tsui Hark.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton embraces the spirit of Chinese blockbusters to chisel a spectacular new take on superheroes with roots in eastern mysticism, the martial arts cinema and the most unknown comics of the house, with which you can find an action scene on a bus worthy of Stephen Chow, – the best of the film, without a doubt – to a fight on scaffolding that could appear in one of Jackie Chan to a general plot that might remind ‘The only‘(The One, 2001).
Awkwafina scene stealer
Everything is crowned with a third act more solemn and closer to the cinema of Zhang Yimou that makes everything seen in ‘Mulan’ pale -only the vibrant prologue is better than that one- and with a monstrous dessert that brings it closer to the most eighties fantastic, although it leaves too many points in common with ‘Raya’ so that everything does not end sometimes feeling like a variation of the same template from “Make Your American Movie With Asian Roots In 12 Comfortable Steps And A Pair Of Dragons.”
In that same pack appear the biggest bumps of the whole, an overexposure of details from the past of Shang-Chi that are recreated each time, not without a curious structure of peeling the onion, but clearly excessive in their accumulation of flashbacks that break an otherwise very solid rhythm and nothing heavy, since alongside the solemnity of family problems there is a good amount of house-brand humor that makes the film rise and we forget that there are moments when he takes everything too seriously.
And is that the heart of the film is in some very well written characters, with a brilliant Awkwafina and stealing scenes and the great discovery of Simu Liu as the protagonist. Both work with on-screen chemistry and make an unpredictable couple that makes you forget the small mismatches in rhythm, or other characters that are not up to par, like Xialing. To compensate, there are some surprise appearances that show the script’s great ability to embrace the absurd.
The Marvel formula at its best
And it is that the delirium that they achieve with a certain character allows us to clearly see how Marvel knows exactly how to create a waterfall of gags that serves as fuel so that the action and the big show scenes overlap in a state of exaltation that the studio has so well defined. It is becoming easier to see the scaffolding, but the truth is that they never stop working, offering solid pieces of entertainment that we can define as usual with another sauce, but they know how to do the usual too well to matter.
With some brands of the house, such as two post-credit sequences, there are some tolls that are weighing on this phase 4, such as indolence in the face of the use of routine special effects. There is no lack of CGI bathroom that ends up giving the impression of a collection of little updated libraries, such as the already too common string of rays and FX “burning embers” that leaves an impression of laziness in the visual section after the climaxes of squirting bunting and overdoses of golden halos in ‘Wandavision’ and ‘Loki’. The insistence on creating an identical style in all films begins to play against.
But ‘Shang-Chi and the legend of the ten rings’ manages to avoid many other common places thanks to an approach faithful to its references, achieving the coolest and most exhilarating Marvel show since ‘Avengers: Endgame’, and making his commitment to the unknown set a pattern of a certain key risk to maintain the house of cards, recovering some of the magic of removing a rabbit from an unknown hat that had operations such as ‘Iron Man’ and that deserves much more attention than the mechanical trailer for the sequel to one of the worst films of his filmography.