A Superhero Movie That’s Worth Seeing for the Villain Alone
Marvel’s <em>Shang-Chi</em> is the first Hollywood project for one of Asia’s biggest film stars. The result is pure magic.
The opening scenes of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings paint a rich portrait not of the film’s titular hero but of its villain. Played by the Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung, Wenwu (a.k.a. the Mandarin) is the owner of the magical Ten Rings. As such, he’s an immortal man burdened with, as the saying goes, the great responsibility that comes with great power. He wields his abilities brutally for thousands of years—leading armies, building terrorist organizations, and becoming less and less human as he sculpts the world according to his vision.
And then he meets a woman named Jiang Li (played by Fala Chen) from a mythical land called Ta Lo. Their first fight, a wuxia-tinged sequence set in a pale-green
