In Hollywood’s latest attempt to score in the huge — but highly restrictive — Chinese market, an Asian actor has been cast as a leading Marvel superhero for the first time.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, out tomorrow, takes the 25th installment in the wildly popular Marvel film series into mythical China, where enormous beasts, mysticism and kung fu collide for a tale about the difficult relationship between a son and his father.
The titular son — played by relatively unknown Chinese Canadian actor Simu Liu (劉思慕) — fled his controlling dad as a teenager, after being sculpted into a deadly assassin, and washes up in the US.
Photo: AP
There he lives anonymously, palling around with the underachieving Katy — played by Awkwafina, known from her role in Crazy Rich Asians — until his father — Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung (梁朝偉) — sends a sinister gang to chase him home.
Shang-Chi locates itself firmly in the record-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe series of movies, with an amusing reprisal of Ben Kingsley’s washed-up actor Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3.
However, its value for Marvel Studios, and owner Disney, was expected to be as a vehicle for expanding into the Chinese market.
“It’s very moving because it’s been a long time coming to have an Asian superhero, and a movie that celebrates not only our culture, but our humanity,” Asian-American actress Jodi Long told reporters at the film’s world premiere in Los Angeles. “And I think that’s really important in this time of COVID and xenophobia.”
Yet despite a predominantly Asian cast, and huge swathes of dialogue in Mandarin — both predicted to be popular among China’s cinemagoers — success for Shang-Chi is far from guaranteed.
Like the previous Marvel film Black Widow, the film has no release date in China, where movie theaters reopening this summer are stocked largely with domestic, patriotic features.
As well as protecting Chinese filmmaking, this could reflect growing discontent with Disney-owned Marvel, whose next big superhero outing Eternals is being directed by Beijing-born Chloe Zhao (趙婷).
Zhao this year won two Oscars including an historic best director statuette for Nomadland, but her success has been censored in China after a nationalist backlash over years-old interviews in which she appeared to criticize her country of birth.
Excitement in China for Shang-Chi also appears to be lukewarm among some social media users.
“This movie will only deepen the world’s stereotype of us,” one user of a microblogging site wrote. “Marvel may not want to insult China, but it is a fact that in terms of casting, it has to cater to the American social aesthetic of humiliating China.”
Another user called it “a poor attempt to mint money from Chinese audiences.”
On popular review site Duoban — similar to Rotten Tomatoes — one user bemoaned the notion of an Americanized Chinese man returning to his homeland to do battle with his traditionally minded father.
“Marvel, do you really want to enter China with such a plot?” the user wrote.
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige sought to tamp down that criticism in an interview with a Chinese film journalist last month, insisting that the narrative is one of the hero returning to his roots.
“That sense of running away ... is presented as one of his flaws,” Variety quoted him as saying during the interview.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton told reporters that filmmakers had worked hard to overcome “some very clear stereotypes that were created in life and society, and that were also part of the original comics.”
“So for me the most important thing to get right in this movie were the characters — that they are relatable, that they are multidimensional, whether they are the hero Shang-Chi or whether they are the quote-unquote villain,” he said
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
RSS