The bus fight is twenty minutes into this film and it’s already better choreographed than anything Marvel has put on screen in thirteen years.
I really enjoyed this one. Four and a half out of five, and I’ve been surprised by how much it’s stayed with me.
Simu Liu holds his own immediately
A Canadian in the lead, which I’ll admit made me want this to work more than usual, and he’s genuinely good in it.
That’s harder than it looks. He has to be believable as a man deliberately living small, believable as one of the best martial artists on the planet, and believable as someone carrying a childhood nobody should have had. Most debut leads in this franchise get one register. He manages all three, and he does the comedy properly too.
The stretch at the start where he’s playing a nobody, parking cars and doing karaoke and generally being unremarkable, is quite funny and it’s doing real work. When the assassins arrive on that bus you feel the switch flip.
The action is on another level
The fight choreography here is the best in the MCU and it isn’t close.
What separates it is that the camera holds still and lets you watch. Marvel fights are usually cut to pieces, because cutting hides that the actors can’t really do it. This one lets sequences run, uses proper wire work, and treats the fighting as something to be admired rather than survived. The bus is the showpiece, and the scaffolding sequence is nearly as good.
Every one of these sequences is exceptional. If the rest of the film were mediocre I’d still recommend it for the action alone.
Tony Leung is the film
Wenwu is the best villain this franchise has had, and it’s not a close-run thing either.
He found the rings a thousand years ago, built an empire across centuries, gave it all up for a woman, and went back to it when she was murdered. Leung plays him as a man of enormous stillness who has simply been grieving for longer than most countries have existed. The motives are interesting because they’re small: he isn’t after cosmic domination, he wants his wife back and has convinced himself he can hear her.
That he’s wrong, that the voice behind the gate is a soul-eating thing using his grief as a door, is the sharpest idea in the film.
One thing I couldn’t tell you afterwards is how he originally got the rings, or exactly what turned him into the man he became before Li. The film gestures at a thousand years of conquest and doesn’t really explain the beginning of it. Minor gap, and I’d have liked the answer.
The supporting cast is unusually strong
Katy is awesome. Awkwafina gets the role that in a worse film is pure comic relief, and instead she’s the audience’s way in and eventually a character with her own competence. Her becoming an archer at the end could have been silly and it’s earned, because the film shows her learning.
Michelle Yeoh is really, really well done as Ying Nan, and I’m glad they gave her a part that actually made sense for her rather than a cameo. She’s asked to carry the exposition for an entire hidden world and she makes it feel like a person telling you about her home.
Xialing is where I’d push back. The sister is a bit weak as written, or rather she becomes far too powerful relative to where she started. She’s left behind, self-taught, running an underground fight club, and by the end she’s operating at the level of people who trained their whole lives. The idea is interesting. The maths doesn’t work.
Bringing back Trevor Slattery was the right call
Ben Kingsley is awesome, and it’s so good to see him again after Iron Man 3.
Even as comic relief, this makes complete sense. He was the man pretending to be the leader of the Ten Rings, so putting him in the film that reveals the actual organisation is a proper joke rather than a cameo for its own sake. It also quietly repairs one of the more disliked twists in the franchise by turning it into a piece of this story’s history.
He’s very funny throughout, and the film gives him a decent ending rather than using him purely as a punchline.
Where it’s weaker
The third act. Once everyone converges on Ta Lo and the Dweller-in-Darkness gets out, the film becomes two large CGI creatures colliding above a lake, and it loses the thing that made it special.
That’s a shame, because the specificity is what sets this apart. Two people fighting on a bus is thrilling. A dragon fighting a soul-eater is what every one of these films ends with. The scale goes up and the interest goes down.
Where it lands
Really good overall, and it works entirely as a standalone, which is rare in this franchise now. You could show it to someone who has seen none of the others.
It sits comfortably alongside Black Panther as the two films here that built a whole world rather than borrowing one, and it’s a much more confident debut than Ant-Man managed. Set against everything since Endgame, it’s the most complete film of the lot.
The post-credits scene has Wong bringing the rings to be scanned, and the answer comes back that they’re far older than a thousand years and are broadcasting a signal to somewhere. Nobody knows where.
That’s a very large hook to leave hanging, and I’d genuinely like to know where it goes. Some of these storylines feel unresolved on purpose. I’ve watched this several times already and I’m still curious about that signal.