Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Parent Guide

Although working as hotel valets may not be glamorous, Shaun (Simu Liu) and his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) enjoy the simplicity of the work – even if their friends and family feel they’re squandering their potential. But when Shaun gets mugged on a bus and loses a pendant that was given to him by his late mother, Shaun reveals a past more dangerous and complicated than Katy would have dreamed. Shaun is really Shang-Chi, the son of the dangerous Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), owner of the mythical Ten Rings which grant him not only phenomenal cosmic power, but also immortality. The thugs who mugged Shang-Chi were members of his father’s army, and Shang-Chi has reason to believe they’ll be going after his sister, Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), who lives in Macau and has an identical pendant. And Katy isn’t about to let Shang-Chi go to the rescue alone…

I’m not going to spend a long time explaining how this fits into the MCU, since frankly, I don’t care. No matter how much Marvel tries to convince me that these are all parts of a whole, they still have to be able to stand on their own. I don’t care if this movie has catastrophic implications for the Marvel universe if it isn’t fun to watch in the first place.

And, surprisingly, it is. Yes, it still suffers from Marvel’s grotesque overreliance on computer-generated…well, everything. Yes, the plot is so unremarkable that you’d swear you’ve seen it before. But Simu Liu is remarkably charming, and I just love Awkwafina – even if her character is only here for comic relief and to ask the other characters leading questions so they can vomit exposition on the audience.

My biggest gripe with this movie is the editing. They’ve clearly done some serious stunt work, and half the time you can’t appreciate it because they can’t stop mucking about with the camera. If they could get out of their own way, the filmmakers might realize that these stunts speak for themselves, and you don’t need to strap the camera to some insanely complicated rig to make it look good. That’s not my only gripe – This movie is over two hours long. It would be perfectly fine at 90 minutes, and the extra 40 are just uncalled for.

Parents know more or less what to expect from Marvel these days. A little bit of profanity, some CGI-heavy martial arts violence, and that’s about it. Shang-Chi doesn’t even have the skintight latex bodysuits you get in other movies. But you don’t need me to tell you whether you’ll like it or not. Marvel movies are so similar that if you like one, you’ll like most of them. They don’t have to be good, just good enough – but this one is pretty fun.