Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings

The Bride
Of Xu Wenwu

Shang-Chi And The
Legend Of The Ten Rings
USA/Australia 2021
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
Marvel Studios

Warning: This has all the spoilers
so don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay... be patient and let me get this out of my system because this is nothing new for the way Marvel have been treating their rich source of characters in their film franchises. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings is, allegedly, based on the old Marvel Shang-Chi, Master Of Kung Fu comic books. Now, it was never a title I read back in the 1970s but I do at least remember the one, very important thing about the character and it is this... Shang-Chi’s father in the comics was none other than Sax Rohmer’s embodiment of the ‘yellow peril’, Dr. Fu Manchu. This is something Marvel retconned, for some reason, at some point in the 21st Century incarnation of the comics but, come on... Marvel movies are owned by Disney now. Surely they could have afforded to pay the copyright to retain the infamous master villain for their new movie (who, incidentally, also doesn’t share the name of his father from the rebooted version of the comics either... go figure). Honestly, I am sick to death of Marvel not treating their characters with the respect they deserve. Not having Fu Manchu in this movie is as much of a crime against filmanity as when they excluded Doc Savage and the Amazing Five from the movie ‘adaptation’ of The Rocketeer. I mean, what is going on here? What a travesty! And just to rub it in, they’ve got one of the most respected Asian actors of our time, Tony Leung, in the role of the father and have named the character... wait for it... Xu Wenwu. Presumably because it rhymes with Fu Manchu. I mean... come on!

And you know what... I am so tempted to just end my review right there before I even get started with the conclusion that, once again, Marvel have screwed their own characters and not done right by them, not to mention completely disrespecting the audience who pay money to go and see movies based on comic book characters they love... only to see them in homogenised and commercialised forms because they presumably think this will bring them more money in. Personally, I think money is a terrible thing to measure success by and use to grant access to the continued production of an art form but... that’s why they call it the movie business I guess.

However, since the film isn’t absolutely terrible, I’ll now give a brief review because, although it’s not the slice of comic book genius I’d been misled into thinking it would be (honestly, it’s not the worst but I would say it’s maybe somewhere within the bottom three or four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies), it does have some entertaining sequences midst other, more draggy and dull scenes, to be sure.

Okay, so the plot is really simple. Simu Liu plays Shang-Chi and Awkwafina plays his best friend Katy. When his 1000 year old conqueror father and master of the Ten Rings comes to retrieve the amulets belonging to Shang-Chi and his sister, to free someone who he thinks is his dead wife from a dark portal guarded in a hidden village... Shang-Chi, Katy and his sister team up with his auntie, played by acting legend Michelle Yeoh, to try to stop his father from unleashing an evil, soul sucking force into the world. And... I wish I could say the story was more complex than that or had more twists and turns (especially since the movie runs for over two hours)... but it doesn’t.

It does have a lot of nice action set pieces though... not as fast or furious as I would have expected from a film which is presumably trying to match some of the classic Asian Kung-Fu based movies but... although this stuff was like a dialled back version of it, well it wasn’t too shabby in places. The most interesting fight scenes took place on a bus and then on scaffolding outside a big tower block and they were pretty good. However, that being said, they both take place in the first half of the movie and so, yeah, as much as they do try and pack a lot of action in, the climax of the movie does feel like a bit of a damp squib, it has to be said.

But there is some nice humour and also various references to some of the previous MCU films and also a few characters turning up from earlier parts of the franchise. This is where it gets properly spoilery people... you were warned. So we have Benedict Wong returning as Doctor Strange’s sidekick Wong, in a few scenes and it was nice seeing him again. We also have Ben Kingsley returning as Trevor Slattery, the Liverpudlian actor who was hired to be the face of The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and the spin off short from that, All Hail The King. He gets some good moments where he mostly manages to win back some dignity, although the conversation about Planet Of The Apes, which shows how stupid he is, has to be one of the highlights of the film. Plus there’s a Black Widow (not the famous one) and The Abomination (played by Tim Roth... reprising the role from The Incredible Hulk and tying this into his re-emergence in next year’s She-Hulk TV show). There are also a couple of important characters in one of the end credits scenes.

So, okay, there are two end credits scenes in this one... one mid-credits and another end credits. Now, I really didn’t understand what the heck the final post-credit scene was trying to say but the mid-credits scene, set soon after Shang-Chi and Katy go to Wong’s Greenwich Village headquarters, has a couple of big characters. One is Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel and the other is Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner... which really had me baffled because... he is playing Bruce Banner, not the new hybrid version of the Hulk that he became in Avengers End Game. Now, we know this scene is post-End Game because, a) he is already friendly with Captain Marvel and b) he still has his arm in a sling from performing his Infinity Gauntlet snap in that movie. However, since we have not been given any insight that he can change back from the smarter Professor Hulk version of his character... and since we know from the trailers from the She-Hulk TV show that he very much is still the new version of his character... I have to ask what the heck is going on here? This makes no sense... and once again Marvel has lost my interest in the continuity stakes. I hope this gets addressed at some point but... what are the odds, right?

And that’s really all I have to say in this overly long review of an overly long movie. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings is not terrible but it’s not great either. All the actors hold up really well, a lot of the sets and lighting are colourful, there are dragons and cute creatures but, ultimately, in between the bursts of humour and action, it does get a bit dull and ploddy and could maybe have benefited from being around 45 minutes to an hour lighter, I thought. I guess I have to look forward to The Eternals next but... so far, in terms of reportage from my friends, I haven’t heard anything good about it.

The Grandmaster (Yi Dai Zong Shi)

The Hand Faster

The Grandmaster (Yi Dai Zong Shi)
2013  Hong Kong/China
Directed by Wong Kar Wai 
UK cinema release print.

So here we have Wong Kar Wai’s new film, The Grandmaster, finally on a UK cinema release but in a heavily (by all reports) truncated version. Perhaps the reason the narrative kinda jumps around a little is because of the various cuts made to it... a film which the director apparently spent a year editing to get it how he wanted it in the first place.

The film tells the story of Ip Man, the Kung Fu Master responsible for popularising the Wing Chun style of fighting and also, of course, known as the man who originally trained the fighting and acting legend we know over here as Bruce Lee. So he’s a pretty important character and Wong Kar Wai obviously wanted to do the person justice... the film has been in various stages of production over the years, to the point that since this project was started, a few other Ip Man movies have already beaten this one out to release by a large chunk of time.

Now I’m already a little familiar with this director’s work on films such as ChungKing Express, 2046 (the sequel to his own I’m In The Mood For Love) and My Blueberry Nights (which I’m actually planning on rewatching and reviewing for the blog sometime next year) and so I was expecting to be watching a movie with absolutely mind blowing cinematography and a heavily saturated colour palette. Well, my expectations were half right... the camera work is really superb in that the slow progress of the camera through the compositions ensures that you get time to appreciate a lot of the beautifully balanced frames the director has concocted for this one. This time around, however, the colours seemed to be quite muted throughout a lot of it... but it really doesn’t matter as the shot design makes it very easy on the eye, in spite of this.

The title character is played by Tony Leung, who is a regular in a number of Wai’s movies and he plays the role here very confidently. However, just like a lot of made up heroic characters do, you really need a few more cracks in the whole “invincible hero” personae to make your characters interesting and, as this is based on real life, it looks like Ip Man didn’t really have any ostentations chinks in his armour so, consequently, the character does seem a tad dull at times.

This isn’t completely helped by the director’s very sedate approach to the mise en scene, it has to be said. Although you do have time to take in the beauty of the sets and landscapes, there are huge amounts of this film where nothing much happens. Now in some ways that’s a good thing because it throws the fastly edited (and sometimes slowed down) fight scenes into sharp relief and makes them more dramatic in contrast... but at the same time I found it to be maybe just a little bit lazy in terms of the scripting. I don’t know why, I usually love this kind of stuff, but the film certainly has a slowed down, almost voyeuristic quality in the way people and scenes are viewed, almost from a distance, without saying much. Normally a quality I embrace a lot more wholeheartedly.

It’s funny, it’s not like it’s a dialogue free movie, far from it. There’s a lot of talk all over it... but in between the talking and the action, the director likes to step back so you can, perhaps, ponder and consider things in your own time and, though I usually am very happy with that style of movie making, something felt a little odd and out of sorts with this one. I didn’t feel like I was getting a complete movie... partially, I guesss, due to the truncated version of the film playing over here and perhaps also because... I’m not sure the amount of material they could have filmed about this guy was interesting enough, maybe? That being said, however, they do start the movie when the central character is already 40 years old. The first four decades of Ip’s life are explained away as a "well off" man living off his family’s wealth and indulging himself in studies of kung fu. It seems very glossed over and I wonder how much of the excised footage included more of the back story for a few of the main protagonists in this one.

Another reason the film has a very voyeuristic feel, a least for me, is that the director treats his extras in a similar way to how Sergei Eisenstein used to do it in the era of Soviet Propaganda films like Battleship Potemkin, October and Strike. That is to say, Eisenstein would pick out a few of the background characters and then (often reshooting them slightly out of the scene in question) highlight them and their reaction to whatever is going on in a particular sequence at a closer distance. This way, the audience feels they are watching events unfold in front of them with a common point of reference as to the effect the main characters and events are having on everyone. Wong Kar Wai does a similar thing here, either by cutting to various bystanders in a crowded bar, for example, or moving the camera so that a “non-character” will suddenly be filling or dominating a composition. We see the smoke rising from a lady's cigarette and the expression on her face as she contemplates the rest of the scene, for instance. There seems to be a lot of that going on which helped create the sense of a silent and laid back space for the actors and stories to breathe in... which is a bit of a trade off in terms of detail versus, as I said earlier, a sense of dullness pervading certain of the scenes.

That being said, you aren’t going to be too bored for long because the shot design is exquisite and a lot of it will hold your interest throughout. The fight scenes alone are well worth the price of admission on this one and the choreographer, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, and director take care to use natural elements and work with them, making the fights more interesting... such as shooting them in the pouring rain or during snowfall where the ground is a bit more beautiful and treacherous. However, the film doesn’t follow a formula of, "the further you go the bigger the fight", as it would do in a Western, formulaic brawl movie... in fact, the climactic fight scene in the film certainly isn’t trumpeted as such and doesn’t even feature the main protagonist the movie is about... Tony Leung is not even present during this sequence. Instead, it’s only after the film has finished during the last quarter of an hour or so, that you realise you were just watching the last big fight sequence of the movie.

The other thing I felt this film lacked to a certain degree was emotion. There is a beautiful fight scene between Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House Of Flying Daggers etc), playing his “almost love interest” Gong Er but, when the pay off to these sequences comes at the end of the movie, the emotional impact that they should have seemed maybe a little muted to me. It didn’t help, of course, that by that point in the movie the director elected to have music from Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon A Time In America playing through the scenes, so I was immediately popped out of the narrative while I was trying to identify the music. Even so, I suspect the toned down emotion of these final sequences maybe comes from a lack of the two characters full investment in each other, for reasons which are not made clear or glossed over in the narrative. Ip Man’s wife, not present for much of the narrative, presumably survived the war (unlike his daughters) and one wonders why he doesn’t try to get back to her at some point... love usually finds a way.

So, yeah, this is not the Wong Kar Wai I’ve known and loved over the years but, with all that being said, you’d be absolutely silly not to invest some time in this one because, frankly, even if he’s not dialled up to eleven here (which is, of course, only my opinion), he’s still delivered a beautifully haunting and, somewhat, melancholic cinematic poem in which many film lovers will find a lot to marvel at. Definitely something you should see before it leaves the cinema... unless, of course, you’re saving yourself for a good transfer of the full cut. The Grandmaster could well be a contender for part of my top 20 films this year and I’ll definitely be seeking out an alternate print of this one sometime soon.