Do you know all the love, admiration, and glowing reviews that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is getting? It is all 100 percent deserved; this is one of the best origin stories that has been part of the MCU to date. It is just a fantastic movie, a movie that manages to be great at doing its own thing, but also in setting up future events as well as having more than a few nods to the past as well.
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The Movie Review
To start with, Simu Liu in the role of Shang-Chi is just amazing, he absolutely nails it. I loved how Shang-Chi is this badass, but he also has a lot of heart and personality. Pairing him with Katy (plated by Akwafina) was a great move and the two of them play off each other really well.
The whole cast does a great job in this movie. I thought that Tony Leung who plays Shang-Chi’s father and leader of The Ten Rings, Xu Wenwu was fantastic. He is a great villain in that he is powerful and clearly bad, but like all bad great bad guys, he believes that what he is doing is right! There is also a bit of tragedy about him too which I think helped to see a more human side of him.
I do not want to go into spoilers about the plot of the movie, but basically, Xu Wenwu wants to head to the magical realm of Ta Lo. He believes that his deceased wife who’s Shang-Chi’s mother is being held there and he wants to save her. Things are not what they seem and him doing this could mean destruction for our world.
Shang-Chi, Katy, and Xu Xialing who is Shang-Chi’s sister head to Ta Lo to try and stop him. What I love about this movie is that while when you see the trailer it looks like a kung-fu action movie, it actually has a lot of fantasy elements to it as well. It is kind of crazy to think how grounded in reality the original Iron Man movie was to what we have in the MCU now.
From a style point of view, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is one of the best in the MCU to date. There is just so much going on here from the “normal” San Francisco setting to the dark and brooding HQ of the Ten Rings to the fantasy world of Ta Lo. The whole movie is truly a joy to the eyes.
While the trailers have shown off a little bit of the fantasy elements, this is just the tip of the iceberg and the land of Ta Lo has some amazing creatures that are all done very well. The special effects in Shang-Chi are fantastic, I know that some people have criticized the ending for being a real CG fest, but I thought the whole thing looked incredible.
Right now, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would easily crack the top 10 MCU movies for me. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and it was a movie that once it finished, I wanted to watch again! Make sure you check out the two post-credit scenes as they are pretty huge for the future of the MCU!
