This year’s Marvel blockbuster is an ideal leaping off point to martial arts classics such as One-Armed Swordsman and House of Flying Daggers
You know business as usual has resumed at cinemas when Marvel films start overlapping each other. Chloé Zhao’s ambitious Eternals might be hogging all the attention now, but Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is still lingering in cinemas ages after its September opening – and this week it has finally landed on Disney+.
For anyone largely uninvested in superhero cinema, Shang-Chi is one of the Marvel machine’s more pleasurable products in a while, in large part because it crosses genre streams a little. Its tale of an apparent San Francisco everyman (Simu Liu) whose secret kung fu mastery comes to the fore when his shadowed past – and immortal warlord father – beckons is more or less in the superhero origin-story mould. There’s more excitement, however, in its fusion of standard-issue Marvel action with the moves of wuxia cinema, the genre of Chinese storytelling that translates as “martial heroes”. It’s all elegantly choreographed and bolstered by some genuine star power. Stuntman turned
Actor Liu is sparky enough, but it’s really the marvellous Tony Leung, as his seductively villainous dad, who classes things up no end.