Well Go USA
In 2008, director Wilson Yip and star Donnie Yen teamed for the fourth time to make a film loosely based on the life story of Ip Man, the Wing Chun master who had been the first martial arts instructor of Bruce Lee.
The film, which was consciously more of a throwback to classical Cantonese cinema than their other work, struck a chord internationally and domestically producing sequels and spin offs of varying quality and becoming the signature performance for lead Donnie Yen who had always been respected for his virtuoso martial arts work but had always been regarded as a somewhat stiff actor.
It’s 15 years later and we’re still milking this.
Young Ip Man is the latest in a series of modestly budgeted and staged Chinese martial arts pictures that distributor Well Go USA has picked up in addition to larger prestige releases from around Southeast Asia.
There isn’t much to recommend it: Ip Man as a character has had all the moral ambiguity and texture from Donnie Yen’s first performance or Tony Leung’s turn in The Grandmaster sanded away from him and he’s become a generic martial arts hero who happens to use Wing Chun.
It trades on the memory of a real man in a manner you would associate with Sherlock Holmes or Indiana Jones pastiche which makes me deeply uncomfortable. Finally, all of the fights are undercut by bad editing and sterile staging.
Zhao Wenhao plays a young Ip Man who has no distinguishing characteristics. The plot begins in 1917 where the film invents a trip for Ip Man from Foshan to Hong Kong to study. Unfortunately, this trip to the south coincides with a master criminal’s prison break and attack on Ip Man’s school. Young Ip Man decides he’s the only one who can stop the hostage situation, but he’s in for shock when he finds out that the gang contains his best friend, looking to make a quick buck.
This is a 78 minute film that was obviously retrofitted to use the Ip Man “character” in an attempt to make it more commercially viable. It is a B film, in the classic sense of that word in that it’s a very short, very formulaic picture that’s designed to accentuate a night’s entertainment rather than constitute one. Nothing about the film elevates it from that starting point. Mu Fengbin is ridiculous, not because he himself is a poor actor, but because his character as the villain of a story set in 1917 is ridiculous in conception.
There’s no attempt to even present these characters as remotely products of their time and place– they look like manga characters from 2023.
There’s a neat idea at the center of the film: the use of the Die Hard conceit in a period kung fu film could have been a fresh way to make a cool fight film on the cheap as it limits the size of the cast and the number of locations in a very organic way.
Problem is that in a movie built around Ip Man, this film has no stand out fight scenes. Director Li Liming seems to have shot everything for economy and so there’s a drab, cheap, digital look to all the photography and the editing doesn’t seem to have much faith in the cast to convincingly carry out the kind of fights we’ve come to expect from Chinese martial arts films.
I really dislike straight negative reviews, generally there’s always something interesting to talk about when it comes to films, but this is a shallow, cheap, and cynical cash grab. Recommendation to avoid.
