Review: ‘Creed III,’ starring Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson and Jonathan Majors

February 23, 2023

by Carla Hay

Michael B. Jordan, Tony Weeks and Jonathan Majors in “Creed III” (Photo by Eli Ade/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)

“Creed III”

Directed by Michael B. Jordan

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area in the early 2020s (with flashbacks to 2000 and 2015), the dramatic film “Creed III” features a predominantly African American cast of characters (with some white people and Latinos) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Retired boxing champ Adonis “Donnie” Creed comes out of retirement to fight his former childhood friend Damian “Dame” Anderson, who has a jealousy-fueled vendetta against Adonis. 

Culture Audience: “Creed III” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Creed”/”Rocky” franchise, the movie’s headliners, and boxing movies that show the emotional toll of keeping dark secrets and the down sides of fame and fortune.

Michael B. Jordan, Mila Davis-Kent and Tessa Thompson in “Creed III” (Photo by Eli Ade/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)

“Creed III” serves up more of the franchise’s winning combination of family drama, boxing fights and friendship loyalty. The movie might disappoint viewers who are expecting more boxing scenes, but Adonis Creed’s complicated past gets a worthy spotlight. Michael B. Jordan, who stars as Adonis “Donnie” Creed, makes an impressive feature-film directorial debut with “Creed III,” a movie that is the most psychologically intricate movie in the “Creed” franchise so far. Fans of boxing movies should know in advance there’s a lot more talking than boxing action in “Creed III,” which has only three big boxing matches and several flashbacks to Adonis’ childhood.

The “Creed” franchise (a spinoff from the “Rocky” movie franchise) began with 2015’s “Creed” and continued with 2018’s “Creed II.” With “Creed III,” the filmmakers (including “Creed III” screenwriters Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin) give a lot of screen time to Adonis’ backstory to explain why he is so conflicted when a former childhood friend shows up in Adonis’ life again after the friend spent 18 years in prison. It helps (but it’s not essential) to see the previous “Creed” movies before seeing “Creed III,” because these previous movies give better context to Adonis’ relationship with his loyal wife Bianca Creed (played by Tessa Thompson) and their daughter Amara Creed (played by Mila Davis-Kent), who both happen to have hearing disabilities.

“Creed III” (which takes place in the Los Angeles area) begins with a flashback to 2000, when 15-year-old Adonis (played by as Thaddeus James Mixson Jr.) was a foster kid getting caught up in a lot of shady activities. At the time, Adonis’ best friend was 18-year-old Damian “Dame” Anderson (played by Spence Moore II), whom Adonis admired immensely. Adonis and Dame have a younger brother/older brother type of relationship. But they both run with a rough crowd and spend a lot of time doing risky, illegal activities. Dame was the first person who taught Adonis how to be a boxer.

One night, Adonis sees a middle-aged man named Leon (played by Aaron Alexander) outside of a liquor store. Dame is somewhere nearby. Leon looks intoxicated and oblivious as he walks by Adonis, as if he didn’t really see Adonis at all. Adonis angrily says to Leon, “You don’t remember me, do you?” And the next thing you know, Adonis attacks Leon and starts beating him viciously.

What happened that night is shown in other flashbacks that eventually reveal the entire story. It’s enough to say that what happened that night drastically changed the courses of Adonis’ life and Dame’s life. And it’s something that Adonis wants to forget, but he will have to face it when Dame suddenly and unexpectedly comes back into Adonis’ life, after Dame (played by Jonathan Majors) has spent 18 years in prison. Dame reconnects with Adonis the week after Dame got out of prison.

As already revealed in the “Creed III” trailer, the reunion of Adonis and Dame becomes a rekindled friendship that turns sour and leads to Adonis and Dame facing off as enemies inside and outside the boxing ring. The rift in their rekindled friendship happens about halfway through the movie. People who see the “Creed III” trailer before seeing the movie might wonder why it takes so long to get to the conflicts between Adonis and Dame.

For better or worse, “Creed” (which has a total running time of 116 minutes) takes its time in exploring issues such as urban poverty, social class prejudices, and African American male experiences in friendships, rivalries and the criminal justice system. It’s a lot of issues to cover, in addition to bringing back previous “Creed” movie characters and their storylines, introducing new characters, and showing a different side of Adonis without fundamentally changing who he is. Fortunately, the writing, directing, and film editing (by Jessica Baclesse and Tyler Nelson) of “Creed III” blend everything together in a way that’s seamless but a little long-winded.

After “Creed III” begins with flashbacks to Adonis’ life in 2000 (when he was 15 years old), the movie shows a flashback to 2015, when a 30-year-old Adonis won his first heavyweight boxing championship. In 2023, Adonis is happily retired, wealthy, and running a boxing training center called the Delphi Academy with Tony “Little Duke” Burton (played by Wood Harris), who has a shared generational history with Adonis. Little Duke was Adonis’ former cornerman, just like Little Duke’s father Duke was a cornerman for Adonis’ father Apollo Creed, Rocky Balboa’s most famous boxing competitor from 1976’s Oscar-winning “Rocky” and 1979’s “Rocky II.”

When Dame comes back into Adonis’ life, Dame makes Adonis feel guilty for Adonis not keeping in touch with Dame while Dame was in prison. Before he was sent to prison, Dame was a Golden Gloves (amateur boxing) champ, and he’s bitter that his boxing career was cut short because of his prison sentence. Now in his early 40s, Dame is considered too old to try to become a professional boxer, but he tells Adonis that it’s his goal anyway. Dame convinces Adonis to let Dame train at Delphi Academy.

Two people are very wary and skeptical about Dame being back in Adonis’ life, because they don’t think that Dame can be trusted. The first skeptic is Little Duke, who thinks that Dame is a loose cannon who fights dirty in the ring. Little Duke also thinks it’s foolish to invest time and money in Dame’s training. Dame is unemployed and broke when he gets out of prison, so Adonis is essentially paying for all of Dame’s boxing expenses.

The other person who doesn’t trust Dame is Adonis’ stepmother Mary-Anne Creed (played by Phylicia Rashad), Apollo’s widow who took 23-year-old Adonis out of a detention center in 1998 and let him live with her in her Bel-Air mansion. Adonis’ biological mother, who died when he was a child, was Apollo’s mistress. As shown in the first “Creed” movie, Mary-Anne and Adonis became so close, she began to treat him like he was her own biological son, and he eventually started calling her his mother.

Mary-Anne knows about Adonis and Dame’s shady past together, and she thinks of Dame as a bad influence, then and now. Soon after Dame and Adonis reconnect, Dame asks Adonis if Adons received any of the letters that Dame wrote to Adonis during Dame’s prison term. Adonis said he never got the letters, which were sent to the mansion where he used to live with Mary-Anne. It’s very easy to figure out what happened to those letters.

Adonis is a mentor to the current world heavyweight boxing champ: Felix Chavez (played by Jose Benavidez), who is managed by his outspoken mother Laura Chavez (played by Selenis Leyva), who is as ambitious and hard-working as her son. Felix’s biggest challenger for the heavyweight title is Viktor Drago (played by Florian Munteanu), who was Adonis’ main opponent in “Creed II.”

Viktor has a small but pivotal role in “Creed III.” Viktor, the son of notorious Ivan Drago (who fought Rocky in 1985’s “Rocky IV”) is supposed to be face off with Felix in a high-profile world heavyweight championship boxing match. However, something happens that prevents Viktor from doing this boxing match. What happens after that changes the trajectory of Dame’s boxing career and leads to the downfall of his friendship with Adonis.

Jordan (who is also a producer of “Creed III”) gives his best performance so far as Adonis in a “Creed” movie. It’s a richly layered performance that looks authentic and well-earned, after years of Jordan portraying this character. Thompson is very good in her role as Bianca, but she has a lot less to do in “Creed III” than she did in “Creed” (which showed the Adonis/Bianca courtship) and “Creed II,” which showed the early years of their marriage and the birth of Amara.

As the troubled and emotionally wounded Dame, Majors brings realistic nuances to this role that don’t make him a typical “villain” in a boxing movie. Dame is a product of his poverty-filled environment and of his personality. He can be intensely loyal, but he can be intensely vengeful. He’s also a messy cauldron of angst, pride, sadness and vulnerability. On the one hand, Dame still wants a friendship with Adonis. On the other hand, he’s jealous of Adonis, who has the fame and fortune that Dame thinks could have been Dame’s too.

Both men have used boxing as a way to cope with tough circumstances and their life problems, but the movie shows how Adonis’ status as a celebrity millionaire does not protect him from his past or how he is viewed in the world as an African American man. Adonis is a role model now, but he knows that things could have turned out very differently under other circumstances. Meanwhile, Dame’s prison record as a convicted felon automatically makes him a society outcast in some ways, by making him unable to vote and get certain jobs.

Adonis and Dame started out with similar lifestyles, but their current social class divide (and Dame’s envy about it) is shown in telling scenes. Dame and Adonis have their first reunion meal at local diner in a low-income neighborhood that the two used to frequent when they were teenagers. Dame comments to Adonis, “I’m surprised you’re still here with the common folk.”

Later, Adonis invites Dame to the mansion were Adonis lives with Bianca and Amara. Dame seems both impressed by and jealous of Adonis’s privileged and happy life. It further fuels Dame into thinking that he was robbed of having this type of life because of what happened that fateful night in 2000. Dame insists that Adonis should help Dame get a shot at winning a boxing title.

As for Amara and Bianca, they’re not exactly sidelined, but their storylines in “Creed III” are secondary to what’s going on between Adonis and Dame. Amara is a singer/musician who has successfully transitioned from being a performer to being a music producer because of her partial hearing condition. Amara mentions how painful it was for her to give up performing on stage, but her feelings about this issue are never fully explored in “Creed III.”

Amara is a lively and intelligent “daddy’s girl,” who eagerly learns how to box and takes Adonis’ self-defense advice to heart. The movie has multiple scenes of Amara doing shadow boxing training with Adonis. It all seems like a blatant set-up for a future “Creed” movie about Amara when she’s an adult and inevitably becomes a boxer. Someone call Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammad Ali) for advice.

Amara’s fight skills cause problems when Amara punches a girl classmate who bullies Amara by stealing a drawing that Amara made and ripping up the drawing in front of Amara. A parent-teacher meeting about this fight shows the different parenting styles of Adonis (who doesn’t have a problem with what Amara did) and Bianca, who does have a problem with it. Bianca feels that she has to be the parent to teach Amara that throwing punches isn’t always the best way to resolve a fight.

There’s also friction between Bianca and Adonis later in the movie, because he won’t open up and tell her all the details about what happened in the incident that landed Dame in prison. This incident is the root cause of all the hard feelings between these two on-again/off-again friends. Previous “Creed” movies only hinted at Adonis’ difficult past. “Creed III” is a deep dive into it.

Is this a psychological drama or a boxing movie? It’s both. The boxing scenes are adrenaline-packed and thrilling, of course, but “Creed III” is also concerned with showing how fame and fortune can affect relationships but can’t change the past and can’t change how people fundamentally feel about themselves. It’s a hard lesson that Adonis has to learn, even if it comes at a painful cost of having a friend turn into an enemy. “Creed III” is by no means the end of the “Creed” franchise, but it does close a chapter on Adonis’ toughest fight of reconciling his past with his present.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures will release “Creed III” in U.S. cinemas on March 3, 2023.

Review: ‘The Contractor’ (2022), starring Chris Pine

April 26, 2022

by Carla Hay

Chris Pine in “The Contractor” (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

“The Contractor” (2022)

Directed by Tarik Saleh

Culture Representation: Taking place in the United States and in Berlin, the action film “The Contractor” features a cast of predominantly white characters (with some African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A former Green Beret takes a mercenary job as a private contractor, and he finds himself at going against orders and being hunted by his former colleagues. 

Culture Audience: “The Contractor” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Chris Pine and anyone who likes formulaic “shoot ’em up” movies.

Gillian Jacobs and Chris Pine in “The Contractor” (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

“The Contractor” is as generic and dull as its title, with an over-used action-movie plot of a bitter military veteran who goes rogue. Throw in some ‘daddy issues,’ sloppy editing and a drab Chris Pine—and that sums up this soulless film. It’s also got an awkward mix of trying to be gritty and sentimental, often in the wrong places.

Directed by Tarik Saleh and written by J.P. Davis, “The Contractor” (formerly titled “Violence of Action”) is being marketed as an action thriller, but any “action” or “thrills” are utterly predictable and don’t really come until the last half of the movie. The first half of the movie is a dreary slog showing what led to James Harper (played by Pine) going from being a Green Beret to joining a shady mercenary operation as a private contractor. James is living in the shadow of his father Mason, a high-ranking U.S. military officer who expected James from an early age to also go into the military.

In the beginning of “The Contractor,” James has been estranged from his father for years, for reasons that remain vague. However, flashbacks and conversations reveal that Mason (played by Dean Ashton) was an overly demanding and emotionally abusive father during James’ childhood. The movie starts off with James as a U.S. Army Special Forces Sergeant first class, also known as a Green Beret. James is also a war veteran, and he sustained injuries during his war duties. James is currently stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Now seemingly recovered from his injuries, James is due to go before a board of military decision makers who will determine if he will be reinstated as a Green Beret. However, James has a secret: Because he’s desperate to be in the type of physical shape where he can be re-instated, James has been illegally taking human growth hormones through needle injections.

The U.S. Army finds out when James tests positive for these drugs. He is honorably discharged, but as punishment, he won’t be getting his military pension or insurance benefits. It comes at a very bad time, because James and his homemaker wife Brianne (played by Gillian Jacobs) are heavily in debt and getting dangerously close to going bankrupt. They’re so financially broke, they’re behind on their utility bills. When debt collectors call, James just ignores the phone calls.

In addition to having a financial strain on their marriage, James and Brianne have grown emotionally distant from each other. Brianne and James have a shy and introverted son named Jack (played by Sander Thomas), who is about 8 or 9 years old and the couple’s only child. Because James has spent a long time away from home, Jack is bashful around James, but James wants to be a loving and attentive father, so he makes an effort to get closer to his son, by doing things such as teaching Jack to swim in a public pool.

Not long after getting the bad news about his military discharge, James finds out that his father has died. This death seems to trigger some strange behavior in James, in obvious indications that he has unresolved issues with his father. For example, Brianne finds James doing repairs on their house’s roof in the middle of the night. When Brianne wants an explanation, James says defensively to her: “I’m not my father.”

And in cliché-ridden tripe such as “The Contractor,” that means you’re going to see some hazy-looking flashback scenes of James as child of about 10 or 11 years old (played by Toby Dixon) and James’ father Mason, who was a stereotypical stern and macho military type. As seen in flashbacks, Mason was the type of father who expected James to be tough from a very early age. He even forced a pre-teen Mason to get a tattoo at a tattoo parlor, even though it’s illegal for tattoo parlors to give tattoos to people under the age of 18.

At his father’s funeral, James reconnects with his former military best friend Mike (played by Ben Foster), who is happily married to a woman named Christine (played by Tyner Rushing), who likes and respects James too. Mike and Christine have two children: Mike Jr. (played by Nicolas Noblitt), who’s about 10 or 11 years old, and Kelly (played by Eva Ursescu), who’s about 12 or 13 years old. When James goes to Mike’s house for dinner, Brianne is not with him, which is another indication of the cracks in their marriage.

During this visit at Mike’s house, James confides in Mike about his financial problems. Mike tells James that if James is interested in private contractor work, Mike can easily help James get a contractor job that pays $350,000. It’s an offer that’s too tempting to refuse, and James desperately needs the money, so he says yes. This “private contractor” work is really mercenary-for-hire work, usually done by ex-military people, for secretive employers who want to keep these “black ops” jobs as confidential as possible.

Brianne isn’t too pleased about this decision, especially since James promised her that he would never do this type of work. James has already made up his mind though, and there’s nothing Brianne can do to stop him. James’ family life then gets mostly sidelined, as the rest of the movie is about his private contractor job.

James’ supervisor in this job is a rough and jaded character named Rusty (played by Kiefer Sutherland), who says that James will get $50,000 up front as payment, and the remaining $300,000 after the job is completed. To launder his money, Rusty owns a company that imports and exports coffee.

Rusty knows that James is taking this job because James was essentially ousted from the U.S. military. Rusty tells James: “I was you. That’s why we started our own tribe.” Rusty also warns James about the ruthless mercenaries he will encounter in the job. “The stink of those guys, they will rub off on you.”

It’s an assignment that will take James, Mike and some other people on this black-ops team to Berlin. The other members of the team include a cunning operative named Katia (played by Nina Hoss) and a muscle-bound brute named Kauffman (played by Florian Munteanu). Later, James meets a mysterious recluse named Virgil (played by Eddie Marsan), who might or might not be helpful to James.

In Berlin, this black-ops group has been tasked with hunting down a 42-year-old man named Salim Mohsin (played by Fares Fares), a retired professor of virology who used to work at Humboldt University in Berlin. Salim is doing privately funded research, and he’s suspected of being involved in bioterrorism, because he is developing a poisonous gas that could be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Salim’s research is being funded by Farak Ojjeh, the founder of El Sawa, a charity with known links to Al Qaeda in Syria. Salim and his wife Sophie (played by Amira Casar) have a 9-year-old son named Olivier (played by Tudor Velio) and a 7-year-old son named Yanis (played by Aristou Meehan). And predictably, this family will be caught up in some way in whatever dirty dealings happen in the movie.

Things happen during this mission that don’t sit right with James, so he decides to not follow orders. It leads to James and Mike going on the run from their colleagues, with double-crossings and shootouts in the mix. The action scenes aren’t impressive. And too much of the action has clunky editing, thereby making some of the chase scenes look very phony.

It all just leads to a very formulaic conclusion, where the people who die and those who survive are too easy to predict. All of the cast members just seem to be going through the motions in the action scenes. The only attempt at some emotional depth is in the underdeveloped family scenes near the beginning of the film.

“The Contractor” has all the cinematic resonance of a mediocre video game. That might be enough to entertain some viewers watching a movie with talented cast members who deserve better material. Everyone else can skip “The Contractor,” because they won’t be missing out on anything meaningful.

Paramount Pictures released “The Contractor” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on April 1, 2022. The movie is set for release on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on June 7, 2022.

Review: ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,’ starring Simu Liu, Tony Leung, Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Fala Chen, Michelle Yeoh and Florian Munteanu

August 23, 2021

by Carla Hay

Meng’er Zhang, Simu Liu and Awkwafina in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios)

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton

Some language in Mandarin with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in China and in San Francisco, the superhero action film “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” features a predominantly Asian cast of characters (with some white people) representing heroes, villains and people who are in between.

Culture Clash: A Chinese man who ran away to the U.S. as a teenager, in order to get away from his ruthless overlord father, must confront his past and the power of 10 magical arm rings that are the source of the story’s conflict.

Culture Audience: “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and are looking for an enjoyable origin story that is not a sequel or a prequel.

Tony Leung and Fala Chen in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios)

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings” has plenty of heart and adventurous spirit to satisfy superhero movie fans. It’s too bad that the title character has a personality that’s duller than the average Marvel superhero. Shang-Chi is frequently outshined by his wisecracking female best friend/sidekick. And there’s a long stretch in the middle of the film that drags the pace down considerably.

Directed by Daniel Destin Daniel Cretton, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Rings” is an origin story that doesn’t dazzle in a spectacular way, but it gets the job done in a crowd-pleasing way that serves the movie’s target audience well. Cretton co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Dave Callaham and Andrew Lanham. It’s yet another Hollywood studio superhero story about a superhero with “daddy issues.” The big difference this time is that the majority of the cast is Asian, mostly of Chinese heritage.

One of the problems with the movie is that the climactic showdown scene doesn’t offer much that most movie and TV audiences haven’t already seen before. To put it bluntly: This movie needed better villains. In “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” there’s a villain named Razor Fist (played by Florian Munteanu) with a machete as an arm. That pales in comparison to a “Stars Wars: Rise of Skywalker” villainous henchman named Cardo that had a shotgun for an arm.

Battles with dragons? Yawn. It’s very “Game of Thrones” and not much different from any recent big-budget live-action movie where the dragons are the big monsters that have to be defeated. And a hero going in a one-on-one duel fight against his villain father? Ever hear of “The Empire Strikes Back” or “Return of the Jedi”?

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is literally an origin story, since viewers see how, in China, his parents met, fell in love, got married, and had Shang-Chi as their first child. The movie shows Shang-Chi as a baby, as a pre-teen child (played by Jayden Zhang), as a teenager (played by Arnold Sun) and as an adult (played by Simu Liu). Shang Chi’s father Xu Wenwu (played by Tony Leung) was a corrupt overlord who came into possession of 10 magical arm rings (because bracelets must not sound macho enough) that allowed him to have immense power. His heart softened when he met Ying Li (played by Fala Chen), who charmed him after a sword duel that she won against him. It was love at first sight, and they got together soon after that.

Shang-Chi spent his entire life training to be a fighter and to follow in his father’s footsteps. Shang-Chi’s mother Li also gave him a special green pendant that she said he must never lose or give away. But tragedy struck when Shang-Chi was a teenager: His mother died. Wracked with griedfand despair, widower Xu Wenwu went back to his corrupt ways. There’s a part of the movie that reveals that Xu Wenwu also might have lost his mind to insanity.

When Shang-Chi was 14 years old, Xu Wenwu ordered him to complete his first “assignment” assassination. At age 15, Shang-Chi ran away from China to the United States. He ended up settling in San Francisco, where in high school he befriended a smart-alecky girl named Katy, and they’ve been best pals ever since. The movie does not show Shang-Chi’s American life during the time that he was in high school or in his 20s, but he and Katy have a few discussions about their past together.

Now in their early 30s, Shang-Chi (who changed his first name to Shaun) and Katy (played by Awkwafina) work together as parking valets at a ritzy hotel. They’re very educated and over-qualified for the job. He can speak four languages, while she has a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Katy has a mischievous and rebellious streak, since she’s the type of valet driver who will take a car out on a joy ride instead of parking it. That’s what she does when she gets handed the keys to a red BMW, which she takes to speed through traffic, with Shaun/Shang-Chi along for the ride.

Katy doesn’t know about Shang-Chi’s past until it catches up to him in one of the movie’s best action scenes. It’s when Iron Fist and some other thugs attack Shang-Chi and Katy while they’re on a moving bus. Katy is shocked to find out that her friend Shaun has superhero-level fighting skills. Later, he tells her that his real name is Shang-Chi.

But the “fight on the bus” scene kicks off the movie in a very thrilling way. The martial arts and choreography are top-notch. And there are some heart-pounding moments when Katy has the take the wheel of the bus and navigate through San Francisco’s hilly, narrow and crowded streets. It makes her daredevil joyrides as a valet look like an easygoing holiday in comparison.

Why is Shang-Chi being targeted by these goons, who seemed to come from out of nowhere? As he explains to Katy about his secret past, it means that his father must be looking for him, because the assassins took Shang-Li’s pendant. And you know what that means: Shang-Chi and Katy are going to China—Macau, to be more specific.

If non-talking monsters or aliens aren’t the main villains in a superhero movie, the talking villains better have a memorable personality. Unfortunately, as talented as Leung is as an actor, this type of formulaic, power-hungry overlord has been done in movies and TV so many times already. After watching “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” for the first time, the average viewer will be hard-pressed to remember one line of dialogue that Xu Wenwu said, although Leung certainly gives it his all in depicting a once-loving father who has since gone in an evil direction.

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” does have moments of levity, mainly because of Katy’s sarcasm and the MCU re-appearance of Trevor Slattery (played by Ben Kingsley), a flamboyant British actor who was previously seen in 2013’s “Iron Man 3.” It won’t be revealed here what Trevor does in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” but it’s enough to say that a cute faceless and furry creature that Trevor has with him (about the size of a dog) will be one of the most remembered aspects about “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.”

Dr. Strange sidekick Wong (played by Benedict Wong) is another MCU character who’s in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” although Wong’s screen time is a lot less than Trevor’s. New characters to the MCU include Shang-Chi’s estranged younger sister Xialing (played by Meng’er Zhang, making an impressive feature-film debut) and their aunt Ying Nan (played by Michelle Yeoh), who is the sister of Shang-Chi and Xialing’s late mother.

Before Shang-Chi and Katy go through predictable scenes of training for the big showdown battle that takes place at the end of the movie, there’s another standout fight scene that takes place on a skyscraper. In many ways, the skyscraper scene and the bus scenes are more unique and more thrilling fight than the final battle scene. This movie’s action definitely shines the most when it has martial arts between humans, rather than visual-effect-heavy battles with mythical creatures.

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is a big step forward for Hollywood-made superhero movies that do not have a predominantly white cast. There’s plenty to like about the movie. But as an origin story, it relies a little too much on over-used, basic tropes. Except some of the fight scenes, there wasn’t a lot of originality in how this story was structured. The good news for people unfamiliar with the MCU, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is one of the few MCU movies that’s a true stand-alone film that doesn’t have a lot of references to other MCU films that you would have to know about to understand these references.

However, it’s not a good sign when one of those past references from an MCU movie (Trevor) is more entertaining to watch than the main hero and the main villain in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” Awkwafina might get mixed reactions in her role as Katy, since people seem to love or hate Awkafina’s off-screen personality. Liu is perfectly fine as Shang-Chi, but he doesn’t have the charisma to be in the upper echelon of beloved MCU characters. The rest of the cast is serviceable in their roles. This movie isn’t going to win any prestigious awards for any of the cast members.

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” also has disappointing mid-credits and end-credits scenes. People really won’t miss anything if they skip the credits. However, it’s enough to say that the mid-credits scene does show Shang-Chi, Katy, Wong and two other MCU characters. As far as escapist entertainment goes, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” delivers enough to satisfy people who are fans of superhero movies or martial arts. But people who want more magnetic personalities in action heroes might have to look elsewhere.

Marvel Studios will release “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” in U.S. cinemas on September 3, 2021. A one-night-only sneak preview of the movie was screened in select IMAX cinemas in the U.S. and Canada on August 18, 2021.

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