Directed By: Wilson Yip
Written By: Edmond Wong
Starring: Donnie Yen as Ip Man, Sammo Hung as Master Hong, Hwang Xiaoming as Wong Leung
Yes, please don’t die of surprise, I actually do watch Chinese films — even if they are often one-dimensional, self-serious, melodramatic bullshit — like this one (OH SNAP).
The first half of this film is particularly wonderful. Ip Man tries to get students, but they’ll only be his students if he can beat them. *cue fight scene* One of his disciples then gets into a fight with students from another martial arts sect *cue fight scene* but they play dirty and take him hostage. Naturally, Ip Man comes to rescue him — but a fuckton of students come to beat him up *cue fight scene*. Sammo Hung, ugly unkempt beard and fats and all, then makes Ip Man fight some martial arts teachers (including himself) to legitimize his authority *cue fight scenes on a table*. So yeah. That’s the first one hour of the movie: episodic fight scenes clumsily strung together with unconvincing transitions masquerading as justifications of some sort — which is bewilderingly ironic considering how emphatically the film underscores Ip Man’s general aversion to gratuitous violence.
The character development in the first half of the film is equally abysmal. I can almost deal with Ip Man’s students being portrayed as hot-headed testosterone-charged lunatics who should be made to pay fines for committing killer-litter, but I can’t deal with Wong Leung – the de facto leader of the lot – being an equally humorless, self-serious fucker. There is a marvelous 4-5second scene towards the end of the first half where Ip Man makes fun of Leung’s self-seriousness, but that scene alone is just painfully inadequate in compensating for a hopelessly shitty writing job. Ip Man’s wife here hasn’t changed much from the first movie, which means that she is still just an annoying bitch who complains with a vengeance. When she’s not complaining, she’s busy proclaiming her pseudo-noble intentions (she insists on not disturbing Ip Man when she gives birth), which in turn just makes her even more annoying. Can’t you just suffer in peace? Bigger things are going on here. Like Chinese pride and Chinese culture and Chinese integrity and Chinese dignity and shit. But I’ll get to that. Apart from rare bursts of wit, the other Kung Fu masters are generally devoid of personality. Master Hong, who apparently is the Queen Bitch (omg David Bowie reference) of Hong Kong, and who we are apparently supposed to give a shit about, mostly just gets by with angry glares and sour expressions. Mucho depth right hurr. Oh and someone really has to talk about the Western police chief guy. He’s only featured twice in the first half of the film, and in both scenes he is portrayed as an unsympathetic asshole who asserts some contrived form of Western superiority on the struggling Chinese working-class. There is an obvious, if painfully weak and/or unintentional, attempt to humanize him (the fat Chinese guy with weak eyebrows says something to the effect of THE WHITE BOY ALWAYS AVOIDS THE SUBJECT — as though subtly implying that he also has his own superiors to answer to) but this is completely undermined by the outrageously offensive second half of the film.
Then again, character depth has never been the strong suit of Chinese films, so maybe I’m just expecting too much. Fair enough. But what about the cinematography? If the character and plot developments are both shitty, surely the cinematography must be sufficiently compensatory? NO. The cinematography here is painfully uninspired. For dramatic effect, the camera swirls and zooms in. In preparation for a fight, the camera swirls and zooms out. To emphasize on the intimacy between two people, a classic medium two shot is used. So. Fucking. Boring. Where’s Zhao Xiaoding when you need him? 😦 I think the only scenes where there was anything remotely interesting going on were the ones in the boxing ring, in which Wilson Yip almost certainly took his cues from Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Problem is, the strong fluorescent lighting here is not nearly as powerful or as unforgiving as those in “The Ram”‘s last match, and Yip’s intended effect just falls flat. Also, the use of jump cuts to draw parallels between Ip Man and Master Hong is a tragically obvious thing to do. There’s a lot of self-plagiarism going on here too. The use of slow-motion, and the interspersion of fight scenes with Ip Man rehearsing with his wooden man thing, which were already used ad nauseum in the first film, are both back with a moribund, anticlimactic vengeance. MEH. Anyway, let’s move on to the second half of the film — or as I like to call it, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing trash.
Suddenly, “Twister”, British boxer (with a generalized Australian accent) insults Chinese people (“So this is Chinese boxing? You should stick to dancing”), makes a lot of Chinese people angry, and paves the way for a shitton of mediocre scriptwriting.
Sample lines:
Twister: The winners have to apologize to the losers? If I had to do that, I would have to apologize EVERY DAY.
Twister: BE WARNED. I WILL NOT HOLD BACK.
Twister: By the time this thing has burnt to the end, there will be no more Chinese boxers, BECAUSE I WOULD HAVE KILLED THEM ALL.
Twister: …I doubt that there’s any Chinese “fella” who has the guts to get in the ring with me.
Emcee (speaking for Ip Man): Although people have different status [sic] in life, he doesn’t believe that one person’s integrity is worth more than another’s.
*Vomits into a biodegradable paper bag*
Twister’s lines are mostly just extraordinarily silly attempts to incite hatred towards a person we already know we shouldn’t like. They are also written in extraordinarily bad grammar. Now, I’m not unreasonable — I don’t think Edmond should be expected to conquer English all on his own. But perhaps a translator? Or someone who can speak English? With some remote semblance of grammatical competency? I dunno, maybe that’s a silly suggestion. Silly me. Gigglez.
There are a lot of moments in this movie that could’ve been developed into interesting scenes, but Wilson Yip seems genuinely content with superficiality. The half-time scene when the white guy is given water, a bucket and a mouthguard, for example, could’ve been an opportunity to transform a weak contrast between the two cultures into a dryly/awkwardly funny scene. The scantily-clad girls who signal for the commencement of the matches could’ve been made into complex metaphorical representations of the movie itself (in its appeal to the Western predilection for non-stop action) or a symbol of some kind, but instead they just act as clumsy, lazy transitions between matches. This indifferent acceptance of sluts is also offensively ironic in a film that presents itself as a pseudo-exercise in pro-Chinese nationalism. The slo-mo close-ups of Master Hong having the shit beaten out of him are irritatingly redundant. DO YOU WANT US TO HATE WESTERNERS THAT MUCH? I mean, it is already clear from the very premise of the movie that we’re supposed to be siding with Hong, so why the attempts to garner even MORE sympathy? Just in case we’re too stupid to realize that? Or because the scriptwriter is? Why not take cues from Breaking Bad and focus instead on the blood dripping on the floor? WHY EMPHASIZE THINGS THAT ARE ALREADY OBVIOUS. We already know that Master Hong is going to lose, because Ip Man has to have the final battle and everyone is talking about Hong’s ASTHMA ATTACK, so why the slo-mo suspense bullshit? Oh right. Because this is a movie that caters to half-wits #lulz. The overhead shot of all the Chinese people rushing in and crowding Master Hong’s corpse while Twister celebrates alone could’ve been a stunning shot, but instead the director chooses to make it slo-mo and fade out into black. Seriously? What the fuck. There’s absolutely no appreciation for subtlety or depth. It is as though Yip here concedes that YES, the storyline really is simply a transition into fight scenes.
The sound editing here is also quite awful:
*cue orchestral bombast after Ip Man challenges Twister to a fight?*
*cue low, bad-boy electronic drones with sparse, hollow drums whenever Westerners do something bad*
*cue the same music when fat Chinese man siding with Westerners does something bad*
*cue the same music when fat Chinese man siding with Westerners does something good*
Where’s David Lynch when you need him? 😦
The film’s only saving grace is Donnie Yen, who plays Ip Man with unflappable calmness, self-effacing affability and quiet resignation. Also, the Chinese people drowning out the English-speaking emcee during the countdown to Ip Man’s win would’ve truly been something to behold — if only the film didn’t try so hard to make me hate it.
KevinScale Rating: 2/5
therein, Therin. 
lol