Worth: $5.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Dennis To, Michael Wong, Wanliruo Xin
Intro:
Even for hardcore Hong Kong cinema fanatics, or Ip Man biopic completists, recommending this with a straight face isn’t worth the effort.
As part of the larger mythologising of Bruce Lee within the annals of action movie legend, his master Ip Man has also become something of a pop culture icon in his own right. While films purportedly based on his life have fallen into a similar realm of unreliability as Lee’s own biopics (you’d get less headaches mapping the historical accuracy of 300), works like The Grandmaster and Wilson Yip’s Ip Man series have provided sturdy and entertaining additions to that legacy. Not all depictions are created equal, however, and this one, in particular, is on the weaker end of that spectrum.
Yu-Hang To definitely tries his best as the legendary grandmaster himself, but everything from the performance to the incessantly bland characterisation pales in comparison to Tony Leung and Donnie Yen.
The plot tries to retrofit him into a Batman analogue as the ‘Black Knight’, which unfortunately, sounds a lot cooler than how it plays out in the film. Choose any semi-historical character and nothing would have changed; it certainly wouldn’t have stopped his mentor and drunken master Qiao Wu from upstaging him in every single scene.
As for the kung-fu, this is some pretty weaksauce material for an action flick. A disorienting combination of sporadic speed-ramping, shaky handheld camera work, coked-up editing that makes it difficult to focus on the punches landing, and framing that seems to be too distracted by other mise-en-scène to show most of them landing in the first place. It basically treats its own genre trappings like background filler, which makes the actual background filler with the faux-dramatic moments come off that much worse. Not for nothing, but the sound mixing is pretty dire as well; anyone who decides to watch this at home with headphones will be in for a rough time.
If the supposed main draw of this kind of feature can’t even hold up to scrutiny, it’d be a miracle if the writing did any better. Surprise surprise, it doesn’t. Rather than feeling like a tautly-paced action ride, as one would reasonably expect from an action flick clocking in at 80-minutes-and-change, this is more akin to a pile of scraps cobbled together, speeding through whatever modicum of plot there is to be found so that they land with about as much impact as the fight scenes. To say nothing of the anti-Japanese hostility in the narrative, with Mr. Sasaki’s full-moon-specs-polishing villain staging a public posthumous execution that makes even the dicier moments in the Wilson Yip flicks look woke by comparison.
Ip Man: Kung Fu Master is a vigilante flick that just happens to have Ip Man in the lead role, lacking any real identity for itself and serving highly disposable ends in the process. Even for hardcore Hong Kong cinema fanatics, or Ip Man biopic completists, recommending this with a straight face isn’t worth the effort.
