The man who founded the organisation that has been in the background of these films since the first one, and who put it down for a while because he fell in love.
Xu Wenwu is the correction of a joke. The Ten Rings were named in Iron Man in 2008 and used as a front twice more, and this film finally puts a person at the head of them: a conqueror who has been alive for centuries, has run the organisation through most of them, and gave it up when he met Ying Li at the gate of a hidden village.
Tony Leung plays him without any of the theatre the part invites. What is left is a father who trained one child into a weapon and locked the other out of the room, and who is now being told by a voice he believes is his wife’s that she is still alive behind a door.
Show detailsThree films' worth of cleanup
The Ten Rings appear as the kidnappers in Iron Man, as a name borrowed by Aldrich Killian’s fake Mandarin in Iron Man 3, and in the one-shot All Hail the King, which establishes that the real organisation exists and is annoyed. This film is the one that says who was actually in charge.