![]() the Mandarin - a genius choice that gives us the most memorable Marvel villain in ages and beautifully, even subliminally, connects a piece of studio product to a rich, vibrant canon of Asian cinema. And most of it, as I argued at length in my review, is due to the casting of Tony Leung as Shang-Chi’s estranged father, Xu Wenwu, a.k.a. ![]() Part of it is due to a clever, time-bending script (by Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Lanham) that doubles as both a wrenching drama of family dysfunction and a dry comedy of cross-generational, cross-cultural conflict. Part of this is due to the obvious but still-noteworthy fact that Liu and his gifted co-stars, including Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang and Michelle Yeoh, are all actors of Asian descent in Marvel’s first Asian-led, Asian-ensemble superhero movie. The best parts of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” manage this - imperfectly, but sometimes thrillingly. Simu Liu teams up with director Destin Daniel Cretton for a superhero origin story with more family psychodrama and better action than the Marvel norm. Movies Review: The real star of Marvel’s ‘Shang-Chi’ is not who you think it is My own takeaway? While I grasp the diminishing, marginalizing implications of the word, I frankly wish more Marvel movies were experiments, wish more of them were willing to scribble outside this franchise’s ever-exacting narrative lines and show a little more pizzazz and personality. There are a lot of ways to interpret Liu’s comment: as a misunderstanding, since Chapek was speaking about a distribution strategy rather than a movie as an apt critique of an entertainment industry that routinely promotes diversity with one hand and dispenses micro-aggressions with the other and as a highly visible ( if relatively mild) example of an actor speaking truth to the Marvel-industrial complex’s power. We are the ceiling-breakers.” The tweet goes on - if you pay even the slightest attention to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this isn’t the first time you’re hearing about it - and it was interpreted by many as a thinly veiled rebuke of Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek, who had recently characterized “Shang-Chi’s” unusual 45-day release window as “an interesting experiment.” Justin Chang: A few weeks ago, Simu Liu, who plays the title Marvel hero in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” issued an attention-grabbing Twitter clarion call on behalf of his new movie. ![]() For spoiler-free reads please check out our review, our Q&A with Awkwafina and Kumail Nanjiani on their MCU debuts, our feature on how “Shang-Chi” came to be and our episode of the Asian Enough podcast with Simu Liu before coming back later. Spoiler alert: The following conversation discusses the entirety of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and is intended to be read after you’ve seen the film. ![]()
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