Theatrical roundup: ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,’ ‘Candyman’

By Jake Skubish

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

You may not know the exact plot going into a new entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you should have a good idea of what the film will be visually. As the most financially successful enterprise in movie history, the MCU is obligated to sustain a consistent visual approach across its now 25 feature films. Save for the occasional Ruth Carter costume the MCU films share a dull, corporatized blockbuster style that makes them indistinguishable outside of the hero at the center of the frame.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings challenges those visual restraints, and director Destin Daniel Cretton’s distinct perspective elevates Shang-Chi to a spot among the very best MCU films. The clarity of the action sequences stands out most. After a decade atop the box office Marvel has hardly figured out how to make a fight scene engaging, opting instead for muddled CGI nonsense.

Shang-Chi embraces the hand-to-hand combat of kung fu films, and these tactile action sequences are where the film is at its best. Two scenes in the first half of the film, one set on a bus in San Francisco and another on the scaffolding outside a high-rise in China, are expertly choreographed and completely thrilling. The bus scene is the best action scene of any Marvel movie, and it’s not close. Simu Liu, the film’s star, is a charismatic screen presence and a skilled stuntman; he brings a much-needed level of human interest to these scenes that the Gods and invincible heroes of Marvel films often can’t muster.

This is another strength of the movie, for most of the runtime: human characters and identifiable stakes. When the consequences of mission failure are the end of life forever and heroes are indestructible, the stakes of superhero films get so bloated they become meaningless. My favorite Marvel movies have always been the ones where the heroes are human, and thus vulnerable and flawed: Iron Man, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, and now Shang-Chi. Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) are badass, but you also feel their motivations and their anguish. Cretton interweaves flashbacks throughout the film, grounding the sillier stuff in a heartfelt family story. We still have to suffer through a bunch of CGI nonsense in the final act, but the rest of the film was engaging enough that I didn’t mind.

The film’s relatable characters are carried by an array of strong performances (perhaps too many, as Liu can get lost for stretches despite being the film’s star). Awkwafina is exactly what you would expect her to be (hilarious and charming), and Zhang brings an air of effortless cool to the screen. The best performance comes from the great Tony Leung, who expunges Marvel’s boring villain problem with a menacing yet empathetic showcase.

The MCU will fade away one day, but there are no signs that will be anytime soon. So if we must submit to a new Marvel entry dominating the conversation every few months, we can only hope they are as visually inventive as Shang-Chi. And things are looking up: Chloé Zhao, a true artist, will bring Eternals to the big screen in a couple of months. If the trailer is any indication, it will have the most visual freedom of any Marvel film to date.

Candyman

After two modern horror classics with Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele’s attachment to any project elevates it to must-see status. Unfortunately, his ability to tell a complex societal story through the lens of horror does not seem to have translated to his producing role on Nia DaCosta’s Candyman. It’s a truly bad film with not an ounce of the nuance or suspense Peele has brought to his own directed features.

That’s not to say Candyman doesn’t have thoughts: it does, and it lays them out for the audience in the most didactic, ungraceful approach imaginable. (Angelica Jade Bastién describes this expertly in a review for Vulture). In its denunciation of gentrification and police violence Candyman leaves no room for visual ambiguity, or much autonomy or resilience for its main characters. As Bastién notes, “The film can’t run from the fact that it was created with a white audience in mind,” and its characters hardly exist outside of a motion to “commodify Blackness.”

Candyman goes so far as to troll the audience about this explanatory style. Early in the film, Brianna (Teyonah Parris) critiques a piece of art by her partner Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) by saying there is “not much room for viewer interpretation.” Later, an art critic describes another work by Anthony as speaking “in didactic media clichés about the ambient violence of the gentrification cycle.” It’s as if DaCosta and her cowriters (Peele among them) are defending the reductiveness of their own screenplay; perhaps, they suggest, we sometimes need to be told exactly what is going on?

That might be true in a movie with provocative or even coherent politics, but none of that is present in Candyman. Moreover, the film’s only distinct storytelling flourish is the one time it should be direct with its audience, yet is not. When characters learn about the myth of Candyman, or about the sins of police violence past, DaCosta presents the tales in the form of a children’s puppet show. In one such tale, a Black man is burned alive. This violence is the true horror Candyman is attempting to elucidate, but the depth of that horror is obfuscated and minimized by the puppet show trick.

Compare that to Barry Jenkins’ superb television adaptation of The Underground Railroad from earlier this year, in which the act of a Black man being burned alive is shown in a harrowing scene from the first episode. This is not to suggest that Black pain should be an on-screen spectacle—but if it is taken on thematically, would be better served with a direct and honest approach, unobstructed by a watered down, corporatized aesthetic. “Our feverish desire for change, encouraged by the uprisings of last year, is sanded off and resold as progress for the price of a movie ticket,” says Bastién in her review of the film. In its hollowness Candyman ironically becomes a version of the thing it purports to skewer. The film is an act of cinematic gentrification, another example of a lifeless, big studio blockbuster displacing anything resembling human ingenuity or connection in the name of capital.

This all before addressing the lesser of Candyman’s evils: the film is a bore. The characters are dull, the structure of the screenplay is shapeless, and as a “horror” movie there isn’t a single scare in the entire film. DaCosta makes the maddening decision to cut away from directly showing any of the Candyman kills, eliminating the one part of the movie that might have been any fun.

I still have high hopes for Peele’s next feature, Nope, set to release in July 2022. But Candyman is proof that his knack for thoughtful horror is not always going to be successful.