The only lively pumped-for-next-movie moment was near the beginning, when we get the Obligatory Previous-MCU-Movie Callback during the cage fight, and see Dr. Strange's Wong fighting with...hey, howabout that, they actually DID manage to get Fin Fang Foom into the MCU! Well, they coulda told us ahead of time!
Again, I'm sure I'll get the usual "No, no, Asia loves superheroes, look how much money Spider-man made, and they all cosplay as Spider-Gwen at the Beijing Comic-con!" defenses of box-office, but the problem is that while the Chinese love Big CGI Monster and Swirling Flying CGI fights, they don't understand Batman or Superman (unlike Japan, which doesn't quite understand them either, they don't play well in a country where most grew up believing Social Authority is Good, or Else), and they're more interested in how much it resembles one of their own movies they can understand.At its core, however, it was the same old father-son angle, the misguided villain, the wacky sidekick, etc.
Which is why we get big historical-epic armies in the prologue, the East-meets-West rom-com for the funny subplot, a knockoff of that Hollywood speeding-bus movie they liked, the family drama for the main story, traditional-looking faux-Wuxia for the middle third, and back to the CGI-enhanced monsters and kung-fu for the climax. Oo, quick, send them the Loki series!
(When Auntie Nan does her big CGI enhanced swirling-leaf trick, all I could picture was the big climactic game from the end of Stephen Chow's "Shaolin Soccer", and how that movie did a better kung-fu parody of somebody else's genre, without overtly trying to BE that other genre.)
The Darciest character since Darcy.
- Although, the fact that this is the second Disney movie I've seen in as many weeks with Awkwafina as the wacky "hip" babbling comedy-relief girl does not make me feel better about it. It's sort of the reverse of Raya, where the dragon was the only character we could like.
And if anyone tried to confuse me in a fight by singing Hotel California, they'd probably be punched in the face long before the dark, desert highway, like our character did when trying it against actual comic-book foes. Granted, it would be more about the song than the strategy, but still.
