Shang-Chi: The 10 Best Action Sequences

Shang-Chi: The 10 Best Action Sequences

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

The MCU’s movies have always set themselves apart by exploring new genre frameworks. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has even more exciting action sequences than the average Marvel movie because it explores one of the most thrilling subgenres of action cinema: martial arts movies in the vein of Enter the Dragon and Fist of Fury.

There’s a refreshing clarity in Shang-Chi’s action sequences. The MCU has a lot of choppy fight scenes with a disorienting array of cuts between actors and their stunt doubles, but Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton shot a lot of his movie’s fight scenes in unbroken long takes with kinetic camera movements.

Wong Vs. Abomination

Shang-Chi: The 10 Best Action Sequences

There are a few familiar faces at the underground fight club in Macau, like Red Room assassin Helen taking on a fighter infected with the Extremis virus. The most familiar MCU characters in the Golden Daggers Club are fighting in the main cage: Doctor Strange’s sidekick Wong and The Incredible Hulk villain Abomination.

Wong is clearly physically outmatched in the fight, but he uses a portal to show the Abomination how much his punches hurt by redirecting his fist into his own face.

Wenwu Vs. Li

Wenwu fighting Li in the prologue of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

During the prologue, when Wenwu has run out of worlds to conquer, he heads into a magical moving forest to find a new one and meets his future wife Ying Li. In his thousand-year reign of terror, she’s the first opponent who presents a real threat, and he’s so smitten that he ends up marrying her.

Set against the backdrop of a tranquil secluded garden, this sequence is more of a ballet than a fight. The duo’s beautiful, poetic choreography floating through the trees is an awesome homage to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The Soul Eaters Attack Ta Lo

A Soul Eater kills the Death Dealer in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

After Wenwu has weakened the Gate, the Soul Eaters start to escape and descend upon Ta Lo. The Ten Rings mercenaries and the villagers break up their battle and reluctantly join forces to face a common enemy.

The grave threat presented by the Soul Eaters is established when the seemingly unkillable side villain Death Dealer is reduced to a limp corpse in seconds.

The Great Protector Vs. The Dweller-In-Darkness

Shang-Chi awakens the Great Protector in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

The smaller scale of the MCU’s solo movies means that their action-packed finales often don’t go as far as their epic-sized Avengers counterparts. But when Wenwu breaks open the Gate and the Dweller-in-Darkness makes it out into the light of day, Shang-Chi takes its action even further than fans expected.

As much fun as the grounded martial arts fights are, the fantastical spectacle of an ancient lake dragon fighting an existential nightmare demon is truly a sight to behold.

Breaking Out Of The Ten Rings’ Compound

A car chase in the Ten Rings Headquarters in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

When Shang-Chi, Xialing, and Katy are imprisoned on the Ten Rings’ compound, they bump into Trevor Slattery, who enlightens them to an escape route and a moving forest that grants access to a fantasy realm. After breaking out of their cell, the group jacks Razor Fist’s car.

Katy drives because she’s the best driver of the group, and she has to keep improvising as the Ten Rings’ convoy of armored vehicles relentlessly chases after them. Shang-Chi fights a motorcyclist assassin and has to drag him inside the car to get his fingerprint to open the gate to let them out. There’s a great tension in having pursuing mercenaries behind them and a locked gate in front of them — danger is closing in from both sides.

Shang-Chi Vs. Xialing

Xialing in a cage match in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

When Shang-Chi goes to an address in Macau that he thinks his sister sent him so he could find her, he learns that it’s an underground fight club (not literally underground; it’s about 100 stories up). He’s tricked into signing up and his first opponent is Xialing herself, who isn’t expecting his arrival and proceeds to wipe the floor with him.

It was exciting to see the Mandarin’s two personal apprentices (and biological offspring) pitted against each other in hand-to-hand combat. Unsurprisingly, the one who couldn’t escape his clutches and therefore spent their whole life under his tutelage is the superior fighter.

Wenwu Avenges His Wife’s Death

Wenwu takes young Shang-Chi to a restaurant

This gritty set piece is like something from a Scorsese gangster movie if Robert De Niro had magical rings. Wenwu takes his young son to a shady restaurant to identify his wife’s killers, then brutally dispatches them with the might of the Ten Rings in front of him.

The mirror walls of the restaurant allow Cretton to include Wenwu’s vengeful rampage and young Shang-Chi’s disturbed reaction in the same frame.

The Scaffolding Fight

Shang-Chi fighting the Ten Rings on some scaffolding

When the Ten Rings invade the Macau fight club, Shang-Chi and Katy escape through a window and start shuffling across scaffolding to an elevator shaft. Unfortunately, they’re promptly joined by ninja assassins. Cretton captures the intense fight choreography of this sequence in a series of swooping long takes.

The scaffolding gives the stunt team a network of metal bars to swing around on. The fights themselves are exciting enough, but there’s the added tension of hanging off the side of a skyscraper with a 500-foot drop just inches away from each melee.

Shang-Chi Vs. Wenwu

Shang-Chi and Wenwu fighting with the Ten Rings

Shang-Chi’s climactic fight with Wenwu in a bid to prevent his doomed attempt to resurrect his wife may be the latest in a long line of hero-versus-estranged-father fights in the MCU (Star-Lord vs. Ego, Gamora vs. Thanos, Tony Stark vs. pseudo-paternal figure Obadiah Stane, etc.), but it’s one of the most resonant. Simu Liu and Tony Leung’s nuanced acting between superhuman smackdowns makes the father-son emotions ring true.

After Wenwu wins the fight, he has a poignant moment of remorse like Nebula when she thinks she’s finally succeeded in killing Gamora in the first Guardians movie. He blasts Shang-Chi to the bottom of a lake, where he awakens the Great Protector and instigates the visually stunning dragon fight.

The Bus Fight

Shang-Chi fighting on a bus in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

The first major action scene in Shang-Chi is delightfully out of the blue. It kicks off the action a lot earlier than expected when the first act is seemingly still introducing Shang-Chi’s undercover civilian life. Suddenly, a band of Ten Rings mercenaries attack him on his commute to work. Katy’s already-established driving skills come in handy when the driver is knocked out of commission.

The hilly streets of San Francisco raise the stakes as the bus is careening downhill through rush-hour traffic while Shang-Chi is fighting off several hulking opponents, one of whom has a machete for an arm. This breathtaking bus brawl set a very high bar for the rest of the movie’s action.