Just finished Shang Chi and I'm... a little confused. Are Shang and Katy really supposed to be 24, or with the timeskip in Endgame is it supposed to be like 2031 in the MCU?
Shang Chi was a terrible movie. Every since GotG, Marvel movies have started with the heroes in childhood even if there's no reason to start that far back. Shang Chi is no exception, and may be one of the worst applications of it*. We don't just get to see a single traumatic event in young Shang's life, we time skip all over the fucking place, have frequent flashbacks and spend ungodly amounts of time indulging in retarded sentimentality over his dead mom and overbearing father. By the halfway point, I was fastforwarding past any flashback with the mother because it became so goddamn redundant. The script definitely could have used another pass to tighten up the storytelling.
I'm going to post this scene from Star Wars to illustrate my point. We didn't need a flashback of baby Luke watching Darth Vader kill his father to understand his motivation. We didn't need constant flashbacks with sappy orchestral music to show us that Luke cares about his father. Heck, there's no music in the scene until Obi-Wan starts talking about the force.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0tQiPrdRZM0This is economy in storytelling. This is the work of a director who respects his audience's time and patience. Shang Chi's emotional fiber is trite garbage.
Besides that, I hated the cameos from the Mandarin and Dr. Strange's fat assistant; hated the cgi monster fight at the end; and hated the overlong bus fight. Overall, this is a movie that would have been much better if it were made in the late 80s instead of in the bloated, cgi-infested 2020s.
*I haven't seen Captain Marbles, so that could be worse. Hawkeye putting Kate and Echo's childhood origins in back-to-back episodes was nearly as bad.