Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — The Villain Problem Was Casting

Marvel’s villain problem was never structural. It was who they hired to play the part.

A warlord walks into a hidden village to take it, and a woman in a grove stops him without ever quite hitting him. They fight. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, it stops being one. She turns every strike into a spiral, he keeps pressing forward and keeps arriving nowhere, and the choreography changes species in front of you: violence, then flirtation, then something with the weight of a vow. Watch Tony Leung’s body across that sequence. The aggression drains out of it by degrees. The shoulders come down. A man who has spent a thousand years taking things runs into the one thing that cannot be taken, and you can see the discovery land in his frame before any line says it. It is the most beautiful sustained passage Marvel has ever put on a screen, and it belongs to the villain. That fact tells you nearly everything about why Shang-Chi works when it works.

Destin Daniel Cretton came to this franchise from small rooms. His breakthrough was a film set in a foster-care facility, where the entire drama lived in the question of who trusted whom, and he built his blockbuster on the oldest story he could find: a son squaring up to a father whose love and whose violence were always the same gesture. Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi is hiding in San Francisco under the name Shaun, parking cars by day, doing karaoke with his best friend by night, and the film’s smartest early decision is how comfortable Liu is allowed to be there. This is not a fugitive gritting his teeth through a cover story. This is a man who found a version of himself he likes better, and the movie’s real subject is the slow, unwelcome admission that preferring a self and actually being it are two different things. When the Ten Rings catch up with him on a California bus and the fight shreds the bus around him, what breaks is not his cover. What breaks is his tense. The past stops agreeing to stay past.

Then he goes home, and the movie gets great, because home is Tony Leung.

Xu Wenwu is the finest villain performance in the history of this franchise, and I am not going to soften that claim with a single qualifier. Leung plays a thousand years of conquest as weariness instead of appetite. Everything is stillness and economy: a man with nothing left to prove, moving with the precision of someone who has done every possible thing ten thousand times and stopped being impressed by any of it. What he cannot survive is the one loss the rings could not prevent. His wife is dead, and Wenwu has come to believe she is not, that she is being held behind a gate in her hidden village, and that she is calling to him. The scene where he lays this out for his children is the best scene in the picture. The voice is level. The certainty is total. A father is asking his son to believe him, and Leung plays the delusion as faith, seamless and calm and perfectly reasonable from the inside. You know he is wrong. Knowing does not help you. Here is a man who would rather break the world than finish grieving, and Leung makes that the most comprehensible motive this franchise has ever handed an antagonist, because it is not an antagonist’s motive at all. It is love that will not accept its own ending.

Liu rises to meet him, and you can measure the rise. The looseness of the San Francisco scenes tightens, once he is back on the compound, into the particular rigidity of a son standing in front of a parent whose authority lives in his nervous system no matter how many time zones he has put between them. The film’s sharpest cut into character is a training flashback: the boy Shang-Chi completing his first kill, his face registering that his father’s love and his father’s violence were one instruction all along. The adult remembering it goes physically still, and Liu lets you watch him understand that the trauma is not a wound on his American self. It is the frame under it, the thing that self was built to face away from. Around him, Awkwafina keeps the picture honest as Katy, a best friend with no destiny and no lineage, only loyalty, and Michelle Yeoh supplies the movie’s calmest authority. Her training scene with Liu plays as transmission, a tradition handed from one body into another, and it is the most formally accomplished action in the film.

And then the ceiling arrives, right on schedule, and it is exactly the ceiling you started fearing at the hour mark. The finale descends into Ta Lo and dissolves into product: a CGI dragon, a soul-eating gargoyle from nowhere, a sky full of weightless wire-fu between creatures nobody on screen has a relationship with. A film that spent two acts earning a father-son reckoning resolves it inside a kaiju battle, and that trade, spectacle swapped in for psychology across the last half hour, is the plainest evidence anywhere in Phase Four that the studio does not trust feeling to carry a climax. The reckoning still lands, barely, in the eye of the storm, because Leung plays Wenwu’s final choice, dying to put the rings in his son’s hands, as the only apology a man like this has left in him. But you can see the movie Cretton was making. You can see the exact minute it gets traded in.

What Shang-Chi proves is simple, and it took thirteen years for anyone at this studio to prove it. The famous Marvel villain problem was never structural. It was casting. Hand the antagonist to an actor who can make an audience love the man the hero has to defeat, and everything around him suddenly has a stake it never carried before. The dragons are already fading from my memory. Wenwu at the gate, listening to a dead woman’s voice, is not going anywhere.