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Some key fights in Marvel Studios’ latest film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, honored two Jackie Chan classics.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, now in theaters.
One of the most intriguing things Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings brings to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a true representation of martial arts. Sure, there’s been great choreography in things like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but this film is more authentic, even going as far as to pay homage to two Jackie Chan classics.
The first tribute arrives in the San Francisco bus fight when Wenwu’s agents come for Shang-Chi’s pendant. From the clips released before Shang-Chi came out, it was obvious the hero, his sister Xialing, and villains like Wenwu and Death Dealer would be putting on a combat clinic, and nowhere is that more clear than in this scene, which features a nod to 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx.
As the thugs go after Awkwafina’s Katy, Shang-Chi fights them off, revealing he’s more than just a valet. When one tries to grab him by the jacket, Shang-Chi wraps his jacket around the assailant’s arms and knocks him back. He then quickly slips the jacket back on in time to drive an elbow into another goon’s chest, which draws parallels to the supermarket brawl in Rumble in the Bronx, Chan’s breakthrough in the American market. In the film, Chan played a Hong Kong cop fighting off enemies, using his windbreaker to disarm a man with a knife in a similar swagger-filled manner.
Another tribute to Chan comes later on when Shang-Chi tracks Xialing’s fight club down in Macau. As the Golden Daggers underground circuit gets invaded by Wenwu’s goons, a brawl breaks out that sees Shang-Chi and Katy try to escape via scaffolding on the side of the building. It mimics Rush Hour 2, where Chris Tucker’s Carter and Chan’s Lee ran afoul of the triads, which caused them to engage their enemies on a scaffolding outside a high-rise. They used the setup as weapons, but what most fans remember is how Carter hung off the bamboo and Lee having to save him.
Shang-Chi draws heavy influence from Rush Hour 2 in terms of tempo and style in this scene, as Katy’s the one hanging off the scaffolding. However, seeing as there are two warriors to fight off the tyrants in the Marvel movie, there’s a lot more dynamism and action, with the sequence focusing more on serious combat than action-comedy. Nevertheless, Katy still embodies Carter with her screams as the heroes make death-defying plunges to rescue her.
It’s also worth noting that Shang-Chi’s fight coordinator, Andy Cheng, and stunt coordinator, Brad Allan (who passed away on August 7), both worked with Chan on the Rush Hour and Shanghai franchises. Furthermore, director Destin Daniel Cretton admitted “every Jackie Chan movie ever made” influenced the film’s aesthetic. He confirmed, “We watched a lot of these classic movies to make sure that we were paying proper respect to them and to the long history of martial arts and kung-fu movies that came before us,” and this touch leaves the fights feeling more special than anything that has come before in the MCU.
To see the nods to these Jackie Chan classics, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is in theaters now.
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