Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Director Destin Daniel Cretton's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is yet another example of a Marvel film in which a well sketched villain ends up obliterating, rather than elevating, its heroes. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays the bad guy in question, Xu Wenwu, an ancient warlord who has spent centuries clinging to life as the master of a shadowy assassination syndicate thanks to his collection of alien jewellery. Wenwu's story - threaded throughout via flashbacks lousy with Disney's wrinkle scrubbing digital make up - is that of a thrashing monster, a deathless maniac finally brought to heel, physical and emotionally, by his love for Fala Chen's Ying Li, a tai chi master with ties to an inaccessible, spectral village. Of course, it's Ying Li who ends up paying for her husband's wrongdoings. 

Wenwu introduces a number of exciting tensions to the Legend of the Ten Rings. First, and most obviously, the character is played by Leung, a veteran Hong Kong actor who worked with Wong Kar-wai and John Woo during their 90s peak. Closing in on his 60s, Leung still possesses leading man good looks and is effortlessly capable of communicating both moral complication and a deep, underlining sadness. Conceptually, the character is a cocktail, drawing from several separate but essentially Sinophobic sources. In the comics Shang-Chi's father is Dr Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer's Limehouse mastermind woven into Marvel continuity by Steve Englehart, Al Milgrom and Thanos creator Jim Starlin. Here, the character also offers Cretton and his co-writers Dave Callaham and Andrew Lanham an opportunity to rehabilitate the Mandarin, a supervillain previously portrayed as a nudging critique of American Orientalism in Shane Black's Iron Man Three - apparently a major sticking point for those in the audience who demand obsequiousness in their comic book adaptations. 

Lastly, Wenwu has a clear objective - one that passes for romantic in this hyperbolic, multidimensional, comic book setting - he wants to rescue his dead wife from the afterlife. Comparatively, Simu Liu's Xu Shang-Chi is depicted as a millennial everyman who has abdicated from his father's life of all-consuming criminality to park cars in America with his platonic best pal Katy, played by Awkwafina. Shang-Chi is hiding, denying his terrible heritage to craft an identity centred around a different kind of invisibility to that exercised by his Dad. There's also a dangling insinuation - one that film never capitalises on - that the bones making mission that brought Shang-Chi to the United States was the elimination of an elderly relative of Katy's. Pauses and interpersonal stress are woven into the film but never clarified, denying the otherwise flat Shang-Chi a sticking point that might actually complicate a viewer's response to this fledgling Avenger. 

Aside from a scrappy bus battle that overcomes the film's soft, computer painted affectation to briefly prickle the urban anxiety felt by Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx, the real meat of the Shang-Chi character resides in his proximity to his all-powerful father. Wenwu subordinates his child, obviously, but it's the supervillain's attempts at instruction or, in one case, rebuttal that provide the film's strongest material. There are two scenes at either end of the film in which Wenwu defines to his son what he expects from his heir. The first sees Wenwu take Shang-Chi on a father-son trip to exterminate a gambling den as a way to salve their bereavement. The ultra-confident Wenwu is never in danger, dispatching his enemies with such ease that a note of distraction or even tenderness is allowed to creep in. The gangsters he kills are props, the emotional back-and-forth in the scene is strictly between father and son. Wenwu demonstrating to his male offspring the weight he ascribes to a blood debt. Much later, when the film is winding down, we discover the private thoughts that prompted that outing: Wenwu expected his children to fight and die, rather than flee, when their mother was endangered. Trapped on a green screen background, Leung plays these withering expectations to thin air. 

Yes, Madam!

Starting at a hundred miles an hour, Corey Yuen's Yes, Madam! immediately impresses with a heist sequence that ends with Michelle Yeoh shotgunning a perp's hand off - a twist on a similar scene from Don Siegel's slightly more sedate Dirty Harry. Graduating from a bit player in Sammo Hung comedies, Yeoh instantly establishes herself as an energetic, credible martial arts actress - the perfect compliment to Yuen's punchy direction. Yeoh sprints alongside speeding cars then poses with a series of firearms, all the while dressed in roomy pastels with slicked back hair.

Disappointingly, Yes, Madam! isn't centered around this character. Despite an equally convincing action performance from Cynthia Rothrock, playing a bussed-in brute looking to crack heads after her mentor is murdered, both women are sidelined to spend more and more time in the cartoonish company of John Shum and Mang Hoi's petty criminals. What begins as a series of colourful asides soon balloons completely out of proportion with the entertainment they offer, distorting the film's shape and pulling us further and further away from Yeoh and Rothrock.

Initially at odds, the Senior Inspectors' détente occurs off-screen. Our only clue that their minds have met is the pronounced change in Rothrock's outfits - her clothes evolve from buttoned-up power dressing to the same flared, sports casual collars that Yeoh wears. That both women are kept at arm's length throughout does have one positive effect on Yes Madam! though: you're always happy to see them. Their presence signals an uptick in excitement, allowing the film's energy levels to finally meet the crackle implied by editor Peter Cheung's exemplary fight assembly. Cheung - the unsung hero of many Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung films - creates a exhilarating sense of rhythm out of bold, pirouetting flourishes and their blunt trauma responses.

007 - Tomorrow Never Dies

After three films dealing with a vulnerable, somewhat human Bond, Tomorrow Never Dies reverts to type with an arrogant, self-impressed iteration that skews uncomfortably close to whatever Roger Moore was selling in his early entries. Tomorrow is a victory lap then, the trepidation that ensured GoldenEye's fresh take is tidied away to make room for a haughty Bond powered by test audience suggestions. GoldenEye brushed off its BMW's concealed missiles because, really, who cares? That film was too busy trying to establish some sort of relationship between its two leads. Tomorrow revels in the added value alterations, mindlessly ticking off every little thing Q branch has promised. Similarly, Bond is now a complete expert in every aspect of life, able to drive his radio controlled product placement with pinpoint accuracy despite a cruddy looking touch interface.

Timothy Dalton's Bond floundered because two film's worth of filmmakers couldn't work out what to do with him. His grave, internal acting was constantly at odds with the second-unit stunt spectaculars that he found himself in. Pierce Brosnan has the opposite problem, the filmmakers are trying to do everything with him, all at once. Barbara Broccoli and pals insist he juggle the violence of Connery with the louche sexuality of Lazenby and the flippancy of Moore. It's too much. A tonal assault that only really settles down when director Roger Spottiswoode starts indulging his fully-automatic John Woo fantasies for the finale. Brosnan then is a post-modern mutant, an amalgamation rather than a character; 35 years of baggage hurling itself at the screen every single second. There's an upside though: 007's identity crisis allows Michelle Yeoh's Colonel Wai Lin to breeze in and steal the film. 

Although barely anything of a character, Yeoh invests her performance with a sense of trepidation that registers as an understandably human concern, given the hair-raising events unfolding around her. It's not just that she's uncomfortable around the invulnerable Bond, it's that she's always aware that he's an assassin and, given the circumstances in which they meet, that he might want to kill her. By keeping him at arm's length Wai Lin subordinates Bond in a way Xenia never quite managed. She's so quiet and efficient that Bond regresses into a children's entertainer, cracking jokes and fiddling with gadgets whenever she's around. The audience isn't trusted to find two spies uneasily sharing space engrossing so 007 effectively becomes Wai Lin's comic relief. A shame the same courtesy isn't extended to the set ups used to illustrate Yeoh's martial arts techniques - impacts are numbed by a cutting practice that obscures collision and a blunt foley mix that has more in common with sitcom thumps than bone-crunching violence. 

All in all, the further away we get from Tomorrow Never Dies, the stranger it looks. Prescient even. Jonathan Pryce's media villain Elliot Carver is a slightly more unhinged version of Rupert Murdoch, a megalomaniac who has traded celebrity phone-taps for nuclear-capable stealth boats. Carver is personally vile too. Like all the Bond villains who seek to trap the secret agent in their social circle, he's never seen without a throng of well-compensated suck-ups. His wife, played by Teri Hatcher, is wise to the narcissism and is therefore off flirting with younger, fitter men. In light of the scurrilous rumours that surround Murdoch's most recent marriage, it's tempting to organise Tomorrow Never Dies as a kind of New Labour fantasy detailing Tony Blair's explosive, extra-marital seduction of Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng. Cool Britannia working its magic to canonise the Britpop-era of Blair in a million-dollar shag narrative that finally allows the Prime Minister to openly, and contemptuously, stick it to the Dirty Digger by feeding him to a terrifying chainsaw rocket. If the Bond series are the dreams of Britain then Tomorrow Never Dies imagines a truly fantastical time and place in which governments don't have to bow and scrape around unscrupulous newspaper magnates.

Police Story 3: Super Cop

The great tragedy of Police Story 3: Super Cop is that Michelle Yeoh and Jackie Chan didn't make five more films just like it. The duo compliment each other perfectly; Yeoh's balletic wushu angles provide a graceful, feminine contrast to Jackie Chan's bruised forearm brawling. Yeoh also matches Chan for pure, suicidal craziness. The third act sees her clawing desperately to stay attached to a speeding mini-van, then jumping a motorcycles onto a speeding train. It's equality in lunacy. Although the pair's relationship is purely platonic, there is a courtship at work in Super Cop. Cosmetically focused on two exceptional public servants smashing a Golden Triangle drug ring, Super Cop seems to be as much about the then impending handover of Hong Kong, from the UK to China, with Jackie Chan as an anthropomorphic manifestation of the idiosyncratic island.

Loaned out to the Chinese by windy, idle British civil servants, Chan is escorted around the training centres where China's youth is moulded into a muscled collective. Similarities are stressed through ability and ideological concerns - heroin is bad, essentially. Before becoming Chan's physical equal, Yeoh is positioned as the public face of the Chinese regime. Professional, modern and, crucially, female, Yeoh is China as a personable, forward-thinking nation. A glut of mainland location shooting stresses vast, untamed expanses in stark contrast to the suffocating urban sprawl of the Hong Kong set Police Story films. Super Cop is especially notable because it takes a wildly individualistic performer like Jackie Chan, and matches him with another just like him. The couple don't clash, their affiliation isn't complicated by sexuality or romance, instead they work together harmoniously for the greater good. Super Cop is a brochure, teasing an idealised, synchronised relationship between Hong Kong and China.