This was a perfectly fine MCU movie, but also kind of a sloppy mess. Enjoyable in the moment, but I’m not sure it bears much thinking about afterward.

Things:

  1. I think one big problem with this movie was its non-chronological structure. The movie was about 60% flashback by length, and those flashbacks were generally used to contextualize a surprising moment. So it’s like you’ve been watching a movie where something seems true, and then suddenly it’s not true, and boom, flashback to explain the deal there. I don’t want to say that it’s impossible for this structure to have worked, but I think in this movie, it mostly just ended up feeling like a bunch of gotcha moments.

  2. For instance, the real core of the movie was the relationship between Tony Leung and Shang-Chi, right. But this was played in such a whiplashy way throughout that it just never worked. His dad is trying to kill him! No wait, his dad is actually just trying to get him to come back, via means that make no sense whatsoever and could easily have ended with him dead. His dad has always been a villain! No wait, his dad was actually a nice normal guy for much of Shang-Chi’s childhood and then got corrupted by the rings after his mom died. It makes it hard to portray a real character, when early scenes emphasize a certain aspect of that character because it hasn’t yet been revealed that they have another aspect. In the end, it really just felt like instead of having big wuxia battles with each other, Shang-Chi and his dad should have sat down and talked through their issues with a therapist.

  3. I think this might be the character most changed from their comics version (though the Eternals might be coming up to take that crown, depending on how that goes). He goes from being a guy with no powers in the comics to having these alien? mystical? rings and also some dragon village wuxia magic powers from his mom, I guess. Probably good for keeping him relevant in upcoming group movies. Also, though, the thing where there’s a mystical village that you can only get to once every x years or whatever makes it clear that they’re never going to do Iron Fist in the MCU, because Shang-Chi has taken all the interesting bits about the Iron Fist backstory.

  4. The big cosmic nature of Shang-Chi’s story makes sense for what the MCU is today, but I really do think that by forcing every character into this big epic universe-changing mold, they’re removing the possibility for movies that feel totally unique and different, which is what made the early MCU so popular. It really feels like they feel that they’ve found The Formula for making MCU movies, and they’re just going to keep using it over and over, warping everything to fit the formula rather than vice versa. (But also, it feels like it’s barely possible to make a Big Final Battle Villain that anyone could care less about than “random cthulhu dragon that pops out of a cave just in time for the big battle, and has not really been in the movie at all before then.”)

  5. I really don’t understand what Awkwafina’s character is doing here. I mean, obviously it’s to be the comic relief sidekick, but then you also got Ben Kingsley for that, so it feels even less necessary. And at the end, why did Wong insist that Awkwafina come with? She’s not super-powered in any way at all! She’s not trained, nothing. She got a few days of archery training, got a lucky shot against Cthulhu Smaug. That should be her realization that she needs to apply herself and go get the better job that her mom keeps pushing her to get, but instead she’s like now in the Avengers or something, idk. It feels weird.