A good movie

I already saw this movie but since it bought a brand new awesome TV, I thought I might as well check it out again on Disney+. One of the (very few) positive effects of the Corona pandemic is that we got to see a whopping 4 Marvel features in a single year. In this case, even though ‘Black Widow’ officially belonged to the 4th phase, in fact, it took place in the past and I was really eager to see their first story taking place after ‘Endgame’. Well, the intro focusing on Tony Leung’s backstory was really neat and to see the Honk Kong legend for the very first time in a US blockbuster was already quite mind blowing. The transition with the present time worked fine as well and the action scenes that followed were pretty much some of the best delivered by the MCU so far. Indeed, Marvel had promised a martial-arts extravaganza and they definitely did deliver. It was also a nice surprise that at least a third of the dialogues were actually in Mandarin. On top of that, Awkwafina was a perfect sidekick. Unfortunately, from the moment that Shang-Chi’s family was finally reunited, the whole thing really lost some steam though. I mean, first of all, if his father knew all along where he and his sister were, couldn’t he find another less convoluted way to get them back? Anyway, after that, the whole story turned out to be after all about releasing some rather random monster so there could be at the end another huge fight involving all these characters. Seriously, how many times do they have to conclude their movies exactly the same way?!? The 2^nd time around, it bothered me even more. Basically, you have a really neat first hour, 30 mins during which nothing really noteworthy happened and during the last 30 mins, some endless generic and rather tedious ‘climatic’ battle. Anyway, to conclude, even though it didn’t turn out to be such a game-changer after all, it was still a solid Marvel blockbuster after all and it’s definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.