“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (2021)

I remember the moment I fell in love with SHANG CHI: LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

Wasn’t the bus sequence, which everyone raves about. It was the fight on the scaffolding, which was very, very pure Jackie Chan. I thought “if you ever wanted to know what peak era Jackie Chan would have done with a Marvel movie, there it is.”

And it went on from there to become even better.

I have to seriously congratulate the creative team. They took a VERY problematic concept from the 70’s and turned it into a multicultural entertainment for the 2020’s. “Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu” was a Bruce Lee homage/rip-off created by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy (a terrific artist on this project). He was a stereotypical Asian whose father was the single most stereotypical Asian villain in all of western literature: Fu Manchu. Oh, I loved ’em, but there was no slightest doubt that what we were looking at was Asian archetypes for the “white gaze”: so far as I could see, ALL the creators were white, and they assumed their audience was the same.

So while it was great stuff for a martial arts fan/Orientalist as I was, I didn’t mistake it for having anything at all to do with real Asians, and everything to do with a veddy British view of the struggle against Those Damned Yellow Bastards, with one of Them fighting at our side with Sir Dennis Nayland Smith and the crew.

Fu Manchu has been depicted in countless films and television episodes, and so far as I can…