Marvel: 17 MCU villains ranked from worst to best

7. Wenwu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

Lights! Camera! Empathy! Who’d have thought that the recipe for a spellbinding Marvel villain lies in the simple ingredient of human understanding?

In Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Marvel brilliantly crafts a villain-hero relationship that twists, turns, and constantly zigs when you expect it to zag. From the moment Xu Wenwu, our antagonist, steps onto the screen, we’re drawn into his world, understanding his motivations and the forces that drive him. And then comes the second act – an intimate father-son dialogue that deepens our insight into Wenwu’s motivations. We see through Shang-Chi’s eyes, understanding, perhaps even empathizing, with a man driven by love and guilt to the brink of blindness.

The movie’s climax is just pure emotion – both satisfying and heart-wrenching. Credit goes to Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, whose layered performance gives us a villain that’s not only a total butt-kicking machine but also a character with depth and complexity.

32 films in, and Marvel still knows how to keep us on our toes, introducing some of the most memorable characters in MCU history. In a universe where villains often exist merely as stepping stones for our heroes, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings invites us to see that the line between a hero and a villain can sometimes blur in the most beautifully compelling ways.