Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Movie Review by Movie Insert

 

Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings': Meet Morris, the Creature from Ta Lo

Who’s round, cuddly, has four wings, no visible eyes, and steals every scene he’s in? Why, it’s Morris, the creature along for the ride in Marvel Studios’ Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings. Introduced as the only companion to the imprisoned Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and Katy (Awkwafina) are absolutely aghast to see the creature — meanwhile Trevor is just happy to know he hasn’t been imagining the little guy all these years.

 

“Whenever we are in the development days on a movie, we put together a little war room, and this particular war room was covered with concept art, and comic pages, and inspiration for what a Shang-Chi movie could be,” producer Jonathan Schwarz tells Marvel.com. “We were still in the early days and somehow a drawing of the Chinese deity called a Hundun, a God of Chaos, ended up on the wall. One day [director] Destin [Daniel Cretton] pointed and said, ‘That thing is cool, it should be in the movie.’ And that was the birth of Morris.”

 

Shang-Chi, Katy, and Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) meet Morris halfway through the movie, after they, too, are thrown into the dungeon at Wenwu’s (Tony Leung) compound. Once down there, they come across Trevor and Morris, and learn that the creature actually hails from the secret, village Ta Lo— that’s why Wenwu has kept him alive for so long. And while he might have a fantastical backstory in the world of the movie, Cretton pulled from his real-life to flesh out the little round, furry being. Telling Marvel.com, Cretton reveals Morris is based on, and shares a namesake, with his own family dog, a 15-year-old dachshund.

 

“The spirit of Morris is definitely inspired by my Morris, who I love very much,” Cretton explains. “[Movie] Morris moves a lot like Morris and sounds a lot like Morris. Morris [the dog] is black and brown, kind of a classic dachshund.”

 

Bringing him to life on-screen took the work of Cretton, the VFX team, and the cast and crew on-set to visualize the creature, who looked more like a green blob than anything else while filming. However, it wasn’t hard to imagine Morris there considering that Kingsley took such a liking to the character. As Cretton continues, “Sir Ben became a master of Morris and knew Morris better than anybody. To see that relationship blossom over the course of this movie was a joy to watch.” The returning MCU actor quickly became the go-to Morris person on set.

02

‘Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings’: Sir Ben Kingsley Triumphant Return as Trevor Slattery

Last we saw Trevor, his charade as “The Mandarin” was up, having been exposed as the face, but not the mastermind, behind Extremis. He was subsequently sent to prison, and then later freed by a member of the Ten Rings Organization and brought to Wenwu’s compound. As he tells Shang-Chi, Katy, and Xialing, Wenwu was going to kill him, and then he launched into some Shakespearean monologues. Seeing Trevor as now more “entertainment” than “threat,” Wenwu kept him alive to delight everyone — something Trevor is honestly thrilled to be doing.

 

“It was a very humbling and gorgeous experience to play Trevor again, this wonderful Liverpudlian Shakespearean actor who perhaps never fully realized his ambition until he fell among thieves,” shares Kingsley. “There's redemption. Maybe he's nudging into his real potential as an actor. I realized, in this particular version of him, how much he loves Shakespeare. You see him dressed almost as Shakespeare, surrounded by all the artifacts that enhance his Shakespearean career. He's giving a one-man performance of his Shakespeare canon in front of his captors basically, which means he must be pretty well-versed in Shakespeare. [He performs] once a week, which is marvelous.”

 

Arriving on-set, Cretton was “scared out of [his] mind that [he] would mess up” in front of the legendary actor, but all his worries were put at ease the second Kingsley stepped into character.

 

“He did have quite a bit of a zen quality to him being on-set,” Cretton says. “That's one of the things that a lot of our legendary actors shared. There wasn't this air of entitlement or superiority when they came on set. There was a grace to them, and a feeling of mentorship that they provided not only to the other actors, but to me. I really found [Sir Ben] to be a lot of fun to work with. He pours himself into every character.”

 

Like a real Shakespearean story, Trevor provides the much-needed role of the “Fool,” and adds a bit of comic relief to every scene he’s in. A great example of that is when the group arrives at Ta Lo, and while everyone else is preparing for battle against the Ten Rings, Trevor is busy teaching kids how to play soccer. A simple yell of “offsides” sends the audience erupting with laughter.

 

“Destin made a very, very wise decision; if you have an intense drama that is based upon real tension between father and son, and the father has been alive and empowered for thousands of years, you're talking about history, dynasties, memory, ancestry, and loss, [you need a moment] where the audience can sit back and breathe before we gather them again and fling them into the drama,” Kingsley continues. “It's a very brave and clever choice on Destin's part to say, ‘You know what? Now we can bring on a clown,’ and now we can go and we can go back into the story. I found joy to be part of that tried and tested process.”

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Why ‘Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings’ means so much to Asian Americans like me

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The phrase “representation matters” has become so ubiquitous in today’s discourse, it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. In fact, the word “matters” at the end of any cause is a trigger for half the population to ignore the expression or scoff at it with disdain.

That’s why “Shang-Chi and The Legend of Ten Rings” is so huge. The film, which smashed the Labor Day box office record over the weekend, humanizes and gives power to an idea that many, particularly those that belong to the majority, haven’t been able to grasp for centuries. And that is, being seen means everything.

“Shang-Chi,” the 25th installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the first superhero movie with an Asian American lead. Just as important, it was made with a predominantly Asian cast and creative team.

Growing up as a first-generation Asian American in a nearly all-white suburb of Cleveland, movies starring people who looked like me were few and far between. None of them told stories that I could relate to. In their films, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan spoke broken English and their “otherness” was intrinsic to the plot. Most of the time, we were portrayed as old wise men, villains or nerds. Long Duk Dong may have gotten the girl in “Sixteen Candles,” but he didn’t do us any favors.

Instead, the movies aspired me to be Han Solo or Daniel LaRusso. As a kid, fitting in was a means of survival. Fitting out meant drawing attention to yourself, which only led to getting bullied and into fights. This quasi-rejection of my Filipino culture manifested itself in a number of ways: refusing to attend Tagalog classes like my parents wanted, feeling ashamed when they brought chicken adobo and a rice cooker into Cedar Point, changing my given name of José to Joseph in grade school because it sounded too ethnic.

This experience isn’t unique among Asian Americans. In fact, it’s a major part of “Shang-Chi.” When the movie starts out, the character, played by “Kim’s Convenience” star Simu Liu, is estranged from his family, living in San Francisco and going by the name Shaun. His best friend, Katy (Awkwafina, TV’s “Nora from Queens”), is even more out of touch with her heritage. She can only speak ABC (American Basic Chinese), is embarrassed by her Chinese name and dismisses her mother’s benchmarks of success seemingly out of spite.

Granted, the circumstances of Shang-Chi’s self-imposed exile are unlike any of us have faced in real life. None of us, after all, have the baggage of a 1,000-year-old warlord with magical rings that give him spectacular powers as a father. Still, his struggles over who he is vs. who he wants to be feel authentic and relatable.

Shang-Chi and Katy are both stuck in the middle. Not Asian enough to please their elders, not American enough to know their place in the world. It’s not until they’re drawn into this grand adventure full of jaw-dropping action sequences, thrilling fight scenes and even “Game of Thrones”-style dragons — this is a Marvel film lest not we forget — that they each come to embrace both sides of their identity and realize their full potential.

For Asian Americans, “Shang-Chi” is our “Black Panther” or “Wonder Woman.” For the first time in a movie of this scale, we can look up at the big screen and see faces that look like us and who have experienced the same kind of obstacles we have are indeed capable of superhero-level greatness. The impact of that is immeasurable.

Perhaps equally noteworthy, “Shang-Chi” succeeds in dismantling the yellow peril stereotype that has skewed the perception of Asians in this country for a long time. The ruthless Asian villain has long been one of the most pervasive and laziest tropes in pop culture history, from “Flash Gordon”'s Ming the Merciless to “Goldfinger”'s Oddjob, racist caricatures whose evilness is baked into their appearance. Not that Marvel had any choice but to confront it. Of course, an Asian superhero film has to have an Asian villain. Moreso, in the comics, Shang-Chi’s father is actually based on Fu Manchu, a presence so engrained in the movie in our collective mind we don’t need to know its origins to know what it looks like or stands for.

Instead, “Shang-Chi” flips the script, giving us Hong Kong screen legend Tony Leung as Xu Wenwu, one of the most complex villains in the MCU, as power-thirsty as Thanos and as nuanced as Killmonger. He is seduced by the magic of the Ten Rings, but gives it all up to be with Ying Li (Fala Chen), Shang-Chi’s mother. It’s not until he suffers the overwhelming loss of his true love and the abandonment of their children that he sets upon a dark path once again. Leung’s compellingly tragic performance makes Wenwu more sympathetic and human than pure evil.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve witnessed former President Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric turn into attacks against Asians by misguided people looking for a convenient scapegoat for the COVID-19 pandemic. But “Shang-Chi and The Legend of Ten Rings” isn’t going to cure racism. It’s not even the first film this decade to tackle old stereotypes and feature Asian American voices telling their own stories. “Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Farewell” and “Minari” did the same, their feet much more grounded in reality. But none had the reach of Marvel, the biggest movie franchise in history.

That’s what makes the cultural significance of “Shang-Chi” extraordinary. In the long-term, the film’s success means to expect more from Asian creatives like director Destin Daniel Cretton, screenwriter Dave Callaham and others in the future. Liu, Awkwafina and Meng’er Zhang, who plays Shang-Chi’s sister Xialing, already have their tickets punched for upcoming rides aboard the MCU train.

The immediate impact has been the incredible amount of joy and pride the film has brought to the millions of Asian Americans who never had a superhero to call their own or, frankly, who’ve had just a sh---- year. Here’s hoping “Shang-Chi,” amid all of the exciting mayhem and fantastical spectacle onscreen, has also created a sense of empathy and better understanding among those who never considered what “representation matters” really means.

Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings” is now playing in theaters