[SPOILERS BELOW]
Ip Man (2008)
Ip Man is a solid martial arts film with plenty of action set-pieces and impressive fight choreography to keep you entertained. The plot is simple, but straightforward and uncomplicated - which allows the film to focus on other aspects such as the characters. In particular, Donnie Yen (who plays Ip Man) is a charismatic protagonist, playing a stoic grandmaster of Wing Chun who also manages to have some personality and a sense of humour about him. Speaking of personality, the set design is excellent with many memorable, characterful locations (e.g. the darkened prison-like Japanese dojo; the bombed out streets of Fo Shan; Ip Man's tranquil home at the beginning of the film etc.). In turn, the set design is shown off through the cinematography, which simultaneously draws attention to the fight choreography through finely tuned shot compositions (even if it does fall back on shakycam a bit too much). The main issue with the film is with its pacing, which is incredibly slow at the start, decent in the middle, and ridiculously rushed at the end. Because of this, the beginning of the film can feel rather boring and the epilogue doesn't feel complete or satisfying. Instead, there are on-screen captions saying what happened to Ip Man after he was shot through the shoulder and escaped to Hong Kong - a classic example of telling and not showing.
Overall: 7/10, maybe a high 6 or low 7?
But what really lets Ip Man 2 down is the fact that, while all of the Chinese characters are portrayed sympathetically and in a nuanced manner, practically every Westerner is portrayed as being over-the-top cartoonishly evil and/or extremely corrupt. Not to mention that, for the most part, many of the performances by these characters are just plain bad. Bad delivery, unconvincing and generally hard to take seriously. I can forgive that to an extent considering that this is a foreign film, but still...yikes. In addition, the idea of the final fight to (at least initially) prove whose fighting style is better is such an overly familiar concept to anyone who's seen a martial arts film (Karate Kid, anyone?). Add on top of that the speech that Ip Man makes after the fight which basically asks, "Why can't we all just get along?", had my eyes rolling into the back of my head.
Overall: 5 or 6/10, high 5 or low 6.
Ip Man 2 (2010)
Well...it's certainly more of what was shown in the first film. It still has great fight choreography, with an emphasis much more on variety than Ip Man - you get to see a variety of Chinese fighting styles, as well as a more aggressive Western style of boxing. The set design is still strong, and the plot is once again, rather simple: directly following the events of the first film, Ip Man attempts to set up his own Wing Chun martial arts school in Hong Kong, but as the film progresses, it becomes more focused on settling a match between a Western wrestler known as the Twister and Ip Man himself - a fight which has weight behind it, considering Twister "accidentally" killed a martial arts master known as Master Hung in a previous fight. There are a number of other memorable scenes; most notably, the sequence which involves Ip Man fighting other Hong Kong masters to earn the right to set up his own martial arts school, with plenty of reality-breaking stunts such as Master Hung flicking a stool onto another stool, then jumping off THAT stool up on to the table that Ip Man is on. So, there's no shortage of great fights. And yes, just like the first film, the cinematography is still solid.But what really lets Ip Man 2 down is the fact that, while all of the Chinese characters are portrayed sympathetically and in a nuanced manner, practically every Westerner is portrayed as being over-the-top cartoonishly evil and/or extremely corrupt. Not to mention that, for the most part, many of the performances by these characters are just plain bad. Bad delivery, unconvincing and generally hard to take seriously. I can forgive that to an extent considering that this is a foreign film, but still...yikes. In addition, the idea of the final fight to (at least initially) prove whose fighting style is better is such an overly familiar concept to anyone who's seen a martial arts film (Karate Kid, anyone?). Add on top of that the speech that Ip Man makes after the fight which basically asks, "Why can't we all just get along?", had my eyes rolling into the back of my head.
Overall: 5 or 6/10, high 5 or low 6.
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