132 min | PG-13 | September 3, 2021 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Shaun parks cars and sings karaoke in San Francisco. His real name is Shang-Chi, his father commands an ancient army, and the past he ran from has come to collect. Marvel finally makes a kung fu movie and remembers that kung fu movies need a reason to fight.
Shaun is a valet in San Francisco who spends his nights singing karaoke with his best friend Katy. He is also Shang-Chi, the trained son of a thousand-year-old warlord who wants his children back. The film is a martial-arts epic dressed as a Marvel origin story. It is really about a father who weaponizes grief and the children who inherit his violence. The fight is never about saving the world. It is about whether a son can refuse to become his father.
Simu Liu plays Shang-Chi as a man performing ease over buried dread, and the comfort cracks the moment his past finds him on a city bus. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Xu Wenwu as a conqueror gutted by loss, and he delivers exposition about immortality and conquest like a man confessing rather than threatening. Awkwafina plays Katy with deflecting humor that the script slowly forces into competence. Meng’er Zhang plays Xialing as a sister who built her own kingdom out of being ignored, and she carries resentment in a flat stare. Ben Kingsley returns as Trevor Slattery for comic relief that mostly earns its place. Michelle Yeoh plays Ying Nan with the unhurried authority the role demands.
Destin Daniel Cretton directs from a script he wrote with Dave Callaham and Andrew Lanham, and the early hand-to-hand sequences stage combat as conversation. The bus fight and the scaffolding duel let the camera hold the choreography in wide, readable takes instead of chopping it into noise. The flashback courtship between Wenwu and Li plays as pure wuxia, two fighters sparring as flirtation in a bamboo forest. The production design splits the film between neon city grit and the mythic green of Ta Lo. The third act abandons that discipline and dissolves into the digital monster spectacle every Marvel film defaults to.
The film works best when bodies hit each other and worst when pixels do. Cretton grounds the story in family debt and lets the action carry emotional weight before the finale buries it under CGI dragons. Leung gives the villain more interior life than the genre usually permits, and his presence exposes how thin the climactic battle becomes once he is sidelined. The result elevates the formula without escaping it. It is a sharp, well-staged origin story that knows exactly what it could be and settles for what the machine requires.