Actual bus operator critiques that fight scene from Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings
What would happen in a real fight on a bus between a guy with secret fighting skills and a guy with a sword for a hand?
Scientists love to chime in on sci-fi/ fantasy movies whenever something stretches the natural laws of the real world, like how you shouldn’t be able to hear any sounds in space, or how lightsabers would never really work, or how the moon isn’t really an artificial shell built around some kind of alien hive, but those complaints are boooring and have no real bearing on the real world. We don’t know how physics works in the Star Wars universe, and maybe Moonfall is totally accurate and we just haven’t realized it yet?
One thing that does have bearing on the real world, though, is the bus fight scene early in Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. Buses exist in the real world, and some people know enough about buses to recognize when things about them do or do not make sense!
One such bus expert is (apparently) Twitter user that_mc (a.k.a. “Mack, yes, That Mack”), who claims to be a real-life bus operator in San Francisco and finally got around to seeing Shang-Chi. In a thrillingly lengthy Twitter thread, that_mc breaks down the bus fight nearly shot-for-shot, addressing the aspects of it that don’t make sense and the surprising number of things that really do—considering the fight scene involves “Shaun” fighting a guy with a laser sword for an arm, and we all know laser swords aren’t real (eyeroll).
The main issue here, rather than anything about how the bus looks or its viability as the setting for a fight scene, is that the bus operator in the movie doesn’t react to basically anything the way he should. He doesn’t use his mirrors and he doesn’t use his emergency brakes when things start getting wild, but even worse, when he gets hit and falls out of his seat, it turns out that he’s not even wearing a seat belt. That means no workers’ comp for the guy.
But some things are still dead-on: Someone immediately filming the fight would “Definitely Happen,” the fire extinguisher that Awkwafina uses to bop the sword guy is there “for exactly these situations” (funny!), and bus operators all love it when discarded scooters get demolished during runaway bus fight scenes.
This is all useful information, and hopefully it will inspire Hollywood to be a little smarter the next time someone stages a bus fight between a guy with a sword hand and a guy with secret martial arts powers that he learned from his mean terrorist father.