Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings delivers two of the MCU’s most technically precise action sequences and an outstanding performance from Tony Leung as villain Wenwu. It stumbles in a CGI-saturated finale and leaves its titular hero curiously underwritten. Still, at its best, it’s a genuinely distinctive Marvel film that earns its place among the franchise’s better entries.
There’s a moment on that runaway bus, somewhere in the hills of San Francisco, where the camera slips out through a shattered window and then curls right back inside. I remember physically leaning forward in my seat. Not because the stakes were sky-high a guy with a machete for a hand wants a pendant, sure, fine but because, for once, I could actually see the fight.
Simu Liu snaps into motion mid-transit, and the whole thing plays like a magic trick performed by someone you’d assumed was just the valet. Katy screaming in the driver’s seat. The bus buckling. A body sliding down the aisle. The choreography breathes because the camera trusts it, holds the shots long enough to let a punch land with weight.
That’s the birth of an action star, right there, and it happens before you’ve even settled in.
Why Shang-Chi’s fight scenes still stand out
Director Destin Daniel Cretton knows how to stage bodies in space. The Macau sequence proves it again: a fight on scaffolding rigged up the side of a half-built skyscraper, high up in the dark, neon bleeding into the frame, reflections and drop-offs used as actual tension rather than set dressing. Height means something. Light means something. You feel the vertigo.
What separates these sequences from standard MCU action isn’t scale; it’s legibility. The film’s action team, led by second-unit director and supervising stunt coordinator Brad Allan, along with fight coordinators Andy Cheng and Peng Zhang and action designer Joseph Le, built these sequences around physical clarity rather than camera chaos. The bus fight involved detailed stunt visualization, extensive camera movement planning, and substantial physical set work, according to production, reporting the kind of collaborative groundwork that explains why you can track every exchange in real time rather than assembling it from fragments.
The result is some of the most readable action the MCU had produced to that point. The geography is clear. The human body doing human-shaped things is the point, not a detail buried under effects.
And then the film changes gear entirely.
Tony Leung’s performance as Wenwu
Then there’s Tony Leung, who is doing something no one else in this universe has done.
Wenwu is introduced not with a snarl but with stillness. A quiet, grief-soaked composure that Leung has carried through decades of Hong Kong cinema, most memorably in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, where he played a man holding an ocean of feeling just behind the eyes, letting almost none of it out. He brings that same devastating restraint to a comic-book villain, and it recalibrates the whole film. When the ten rings light up and slingshot him across a battlefield, the spectacle is impressive. But it’s his face that stays with you after the credits roll.
A father who can’t let his dead wife go. Who mistakes his own hollow ache for her voice calling from behind a wall. That’s a more frightening motivation than world domination, and Leung sells it without ever raising his volume. There’s a particular moment in a cave, listening for a sound that isn’t there where he does almost nothing physically, and it lands harder than any of the action sequences surrounding it.
The MCU has struggled with its antagonists since its earliest entries, defaulting too often to villains defined by plot function rather than inner life. Wenwu is the exception, comparable, in terms of emotional specificity, to Killmonger in Black Panther. And the uncomfortable reality is that in a film named after its hero, the most magnetic person on screen is the man standing across from him.
The father-son dynamic and Shang-Chi’s hollow center
The conflict between Wenwu and his son works precisely because of Leung. This raises the film’s central unresolved problem: Shang-Chi himself.
Simu Liu is enormously watchable. Charming, physically commanding, funny in the low-key way of someone who doesn’t need to prove he’s funny. In the fight sequences, he’s a genuine revelation: fluid and precise in a way that recalls Jackie Chan’s grounded physicality without ever feeling like imitation. But strip away the comic relief and the two warring fighting styles inherited from his parents, and there’s a strange gap where the character’s interior should be.
He’s reactive. Defined almost entirely by the people around him: his father’s grief, his sister’s resentment, Katy’s chatter. The script gives him trauma and gives him skill, but never quite excavates what he wants, beyond the situation resolving itself.
The second most magnetic presence in this film is arguably Awkwafina, operating in a register the MCU rarely allows: actual friendship, the kind with history and awkwardness and genuine warmth. Her Katy is funny without being purely the comic relief, present without being merely the sidekick. She earns her moment in the finale.
How Shang-Chi uses wuxia and Hong Kong action cinema
The wuxia lineage is where the film earns real affection, and where Cretton’s instincts feel most personal.
Michelle Yeoh moves through Ta Lo with the unhurried authority of someone who has been making this kind of film since before most of the production crew were born. Her role isn’t showy, but it carries a specific cultural weight; her presence signals that the film is operating within the Hong Kong fantasy tradition, not just borrowing its aesthetics. The bamboo forests, the mythological creatures, the village’s visual grammar owe more to Zhang Yimou than to Stan Lee, and that debt is worn openly.
The clearest expression of this lineage is the courtship fight between Wenwu and Jiang Li (Fala Chen): shot like a love scene, because it is one. Two people fall for each other by learning they can’t beat each other. Framed amid falling leaves and late-afternoon light, each exchange of blows becomes a kind of conversation. The sequence understands something essential about the genre: that grace is the whole point, that violence and tenderness can occupy the same space without canceling each other out.
Both qualities make what follows all the more jarring.
Also Read: Avengers: Doomsday D23 Trailer Breakdown
Why the finale fumbles in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Once the story arrives at Ta Lo and the soul-sucking creature behind the Dark Gate enters the picture, the grounded clarity that defined the first two acts evaporates. Where the bus and scaffolding sequences were built around spatial logic, readable environments, human bodies doing comprehensible things in comprehensible space, the finale trades that legibility for scale. The camera loses its bearings. The choreography dissolves into noise.
It’s a rollercoaster, and audiences responded to it. But it’s the same digital soup every MCU film eventually collapses into, and after two acts of something genuinely distinctive, watching Shang-Chi default to the franchise house style feels like a specific betrayal. Like watching a chef spend an hour on careful prep work and then heat everything from frozen for the final course.
The tonal shift from urban martial-arts thriller to high-fantasy spectacle isn’t mishandled. The film earns its right to make that turn. It’s just that the fantasy half is so much less interesting to look at than the streets and skyscrapers that preceded it.
Does Shang-Chi hold up as an MCU film?
Measured against the franchise at large, Shang-Chi is among its better entries. It introduced a genuine action star, staged two of the most technically accomplished fight sequences in superhero cinema, and gave Tony Leung room to do something that will outlast the film’s place in any continuity.
What it didn’t do was fully solve its own central problem. The film is named after the son, but it’s written in the father’s key.
Still, I think about Leung’s face in that cave, listening for a voice that isn’t there, and I wonder how many superhero movies actually leave you with a person rather than a plot. Not many. The most human thing in the whole enterprise is a thousand-year-old warlord mourning his wife, and that tells you everything you need to know about what the film got right, and what it left unfinished.
Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Cast, Crew & Other Details
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Watch Here
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Is Shang-Chi worth watching if you haven’t seen other MCU films?
Yes, with one caveat. The first two acts function almost independently of the broader Marvel continuity, a grounded action film with a family drama at its center. The finale’s mythology and a mid-credits scene that connects to wider MCU events will land better with some prior context. Still, the bus fight, the Macau scaffolding sequence, and Tony Leung’s performance stand entirely on their own terms.
Who handled the fight choreography in Shang-Chi?
A collaborative team developed the action: supervising stunt coordinator and second-unit director Brad Allan, fight coordinators Andy Cheng and Peng Zhang, and action designer Joseph Le. Allan, a longtime Jackie Chan collaborator, passed away in August 2021 shortly before the film’s release; the movie is dedicated to him. The early sequences in particular reflect the body-forward, spatially legible approach associated with his work on Chan’s films.
What is the significance of the ten rings, and how do they relate to earlier MCU films?
In the film, the ten rings are literal iron rings worn on the forearms, controlled by the mind, that have granted Wenwu near-immortality and immense power for thousands of years. The film deliberately retcons the earlier “Ten Rings” organization from Iron Man 3, where Ben Kingsley played a decoy version of the Mandarin. Shang-Chi addresses that retcon directly, giving the mythology considerably more weight while making room for some self-aware humor about the earlier film.
What’s the current status of a Shang-Chi sequel?
Marvel has not announced a release date for the sequel, which remains in active development.
Meta description
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings review: Tony Leung’s grief-soaked Wenwu steals the film, the bus and Macau fights remain the MCU’s most legible action, but a CGI-heavy finale and an underwritten hero hold it back.
Shikhar Jauhari is an entrepreneur, journalist, and digital content strategist with expertise in SEO, WordPress, and online publishing. He is the founder and editor of WRI News, where he covers entertainment, finance, government schemes & lifestyle. With a strong focus on delivering accurate, engaging, and reader-first content, he combines editorial excellence with data-driven SEO strategies to create content.
Over the years, Shikhar has worked as a content writer, editor, website manager, SEO specialist, business analyst, and finance professional for media platforms, businesses, and digital agencies. His experience spans content management, business strategy, taxation, accounting, and digital marketing, enabling him to approach every project with both editorial insight and strategic thinking.
