*Full and complete Shang-Chi spoilers ahead*
I promise that I’ll get around to talking about other aspects of Shang-Chi at some point, as well as circle back to talking about the Disney+ shows some more, but right now, my brain is still utterly focused on Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Wenwu. Critics and audience members have been freaking out over the character/Leung’s performance, and rightfully so (it makes me wonder what it’s like for people who are seeing Leung for the first time in this movie,) and in amongst all the praise, admiration, and thirst, I’ve seen a lot of people commenting that Wenwu isn’t really a villain at all. Just as the character/performance is stuck in my head, so is that remark, and I’d like to explore that today: Wenwu as a villain, or not.
So, is Wenwu a villain? That depends on how we define it. Is a villain a bad guy, someone who wreaks damage on the hero’s life? If so, Wenwu is most definitely a villain. He’s a grieving widower who’s let his anger and loss fuel him for the last seventeen years, and Leung’s performance lets you feel every inch of that pain, making him a pretty sympathetic bad guy, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s also terrible. In response to his wife’s murder, he trains his 7-year-old son to be an unstoppable assassin of vengeance – who does that?
In short, someone who was a powerful, selfish war lord for 1000 years, someone who only spent ten brief years looking outside himsef and his own power when he fell in love with Li and put his conquering ways aside to raise a family with her. I think it’s important to note that you can’t really call Wenwu “redeemed” during this period. He may have stopped murdering and seeking power, but there’s no evidence that he tries to atone in any way for his past deeds, no suggestion that he’s trying to put active good into the world aside from being a caring husband and father. With such a long history of violent self-gratification and such a short period of being “good,” the war lord is still lurking beneath the surface of the husband/father. As such, when Li is killed, it’s a very short jump for Wenwu to return to his old ways, putting the Ten Rings back on and taking his vengeance in blood, viewing his son as a weapon he can shape for that purpose and hardly noticing his daughter at all.
(Side note: this is the fatal flaw of the “redeemed by the love of a good woman” trope. When a villain’s “goodness” is conditional on another person, it can be shallow and risks being cast aside when that person is removed from their life.)
On the other hand, if you define a villain as someone with an evil plan, Wenwu would not fit the bill. In the film, he has to be stopped at all costs, but his actions aren’t in aid of conquest, destruction, or even vengeance (although the latter does factor into the overall showdown somewhat.) Wenwu wouldn’t even be considered a villain in the vein of Killmonger or the Vulture, two of Marvel’s other more successfully-executed antagonists. While the two of them are doing wrong for good/understandable motives, Wenwu’s actions need to be viewed from two different perspectives: what he thinks he’s doing versus what he’s actually doing. By Wenwu’s understanding, it turns out that Li is actually alive, that she was kidnapped by the people of Ta Lo all those years ago and held there, imprisoned behind the gate. If that were really the case, then Wenwu certainly wouldn’t be the villain. He’d be the romantic hero moving heaven and earth to save his wife who’d been held captive for 17 years. Hell, even his intention to raze Ta Lo to the ground if he can’t recover Li from them, while not “good” in an ethical sense, wouldn’t be straight up villainous in terms of Hollywood morality. How many movies have there been of an action hero laying waste to dozens of bad guys who are holding the woman he loves prisoner? Again, if the people of Ta Lo have done what Wenwu thinks they have – magically fake Li’s death and then hold her prisoner for 17 years, all because they disapproved of her marriage to Wenwu – they’re the bad guys, and in a different framing of the story, Wenwu would be positioned as well within his rights to defeat them.
However, that’s not what’s happening. In actuality, Wenwu is being tricked by the actual captive behind the gate, the Dweller in Darkness. He isn’t the first person the Dweller in Darkness has deceived with the voice of a dead loved one calling out to them for rescue, but thanks to the Ten Rings, he’s the first with enough power to actually break the seal on the gate and release the creature back into the universe. That’s ultimately why Shang-Chi has to stop his dad – not because Wenwu is an evil villain trying to destroy the world, but because he’s a widower whose grief has been exploited by a malevolent force that’s fooling him.
I find that so interesting about Wenwu. A lot of Marvel’s better villains are people who’ve been corrupted or radicalized by harsh circumstances, decent people whose experiences have twisted them until they take their sympathetic goals to extreme lengths. By contrast, Wenwu is a decidedly-bad person who thinks he’s actually doing good for once, having been unwittingly manipulated by an unambiguous evil. There isn’t really another character like him in the MCU, and that makes Shang-Chi’s conflict with him all the more fascinating.
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