Well Go USA
I feel like I have seen an awful lot of these ‘Ip Man’ movies by this point, but it’s actually been the first three and now this spin-off. Donnie Yen is a charismatic, superb martial arts star that I first recall being incandescent in the fantastic Iron Monkey I watched during my martial arts movies phase in college.
There are always elements that are clichéd about these Hong Kong movies, which tend to include a beautiful love interest, a man and his precocious son, a rival who needs to learn a valuable lesson, a rival who will be left alive for another movie, and many evil white men. In fairness, they did create the opium crisis.
Master Z: Ip Man Legacy continues from the last movie by following former Ip Man rival Cheung Tin Chi (Max Zhang) as he attempts to leave his life of crime and raise his son right. The kid’s alright as an actor, really only being in the critical notes he needs to be. Cheung wants to get out of the fighting game (another cliché) but is brought in very quickly (another cliché) due to the monstrous behavior of local gangster Tso Sai Kit (Kevin Cheng).
But the movie gets what we’re here to see, and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Nearly immediately there is a shockingly impressive fight between Cheung and mysterious assassin Tony (Tony Jaa of Ong-Bak fame) that is beautiful. The director is the legendary Yuen Woo-Ping, who directed the aforementioned Iron Monkey and worked as a choreographer on The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, etc etc. The dude knows martial arts action, and luckily there are some talented folks in this movie too.
Cheung ends up working at a local bar run by hard nosed Fu (Xing Yu) and befriends his beautiful sister Julia (Liu Yan). Plus there’s the head of the gangster families Tso Ngan Kwan (the legendary Michelle Yeoh) who wants to go straight and is the older sister of Tso Sai Kit. And there’s of course also Dave Bautista as a ‘British’ local restaurant owner and gangster too, who is enormous and now an actually good actor — obviously we know immediately that he and Cheung will face off near the end of the movie.
The movie draws on a lot of the classic tropes of this sort of story, and the plot itself is fairly threadbare. The journey is on Cheung as a man trying to find himself and his place after his loss to Ip Man in the last movie. It’s an interesting enough angle, and Max Zhang may not have Donnie Yen’s presence, but he’s pretty good too.
Don’t expect anything particularly groundbreaking from the story, but the martial arts scenes are actually fairly elevated. I think there is some more innovative stuff I’ve seen in recent years, but Yuen Woo-Ping is a legend for a reason, and his sense of movement and space is nigh unparalleled. These hits feel real and feel hard, and the characters struggle and push themselves.
We know in the end good will triumph and evil will falter, but it’s the journey we take along with Cheung to find himself to find ourselves a very fun, action oriented martial arts tale that firmly cements its lead as a worthy addition to the pantheon of great martial artist actors.
Master Z: Ip Man Legacy has a run time of 1 hour 48 minutes and is not rated.
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