Filip Pešić’s review published on Letterboxd:
You are a product of all who came before you. The legacy of your family. The good and the bad. It is all a part of who you are.
A nice change of pace and an overall funtime, Shang-Chi is a pretty solid solo story, as well as a great introduction to the phase 4 of MCU, despite having some standard Marvel issues I will talk about later.
What I enjoyed the most about it is how different it feels (most of the time) compare to the most recent stuff we've seen from Marvel. The action focusing on martial arts was absolutely phenomenal with some amazing choreography and set pieces (the bus fight 🤩), the story about dealing with loss and accepting who you really are was well executed with a lot of good character interactions without feeling too clichéd and seeming like it draged for to long, the score was unexpectedly really good and definitely helps bringing you into this world, as well as the characters who were all charming. Shang-Chi and Katie work really well together as the main characters, and Tony Leung delivered a great performance as Xu Wenwu and he might be one of the best villians the MCU has so far.
But one big issue that kind of makes me angry that a lot of MCU content is suffering from is the constant pushing of what I like to call "Marvelism", with an overblown third act full of CGI that strips down the momentum the rest of the movie had, interrupting genuinely great emotional beats just to shove in an unnecessary and mostly bad joke, trying to be lightharted even though a film might have gone with a completely different tone (which might also cause some inconsistent pacing), and so on that pushes it back from being something truly great to just being your average good super hero movie or to be just straight up bad.
Glad that there is a lot more positives here so I really enjoyed my time with Shang-Chi with its great family dinamic, amazing action and some originality, but I still think that Marvel should take bigger risks and stop playing it so safe when some of that experimenting, while it can fail, can lead to something that stands on its own and doesn't feel to repetitive.
