If you aren’t a martial arts guru, chances are you, like me, went around pronouncing the title as “I.P. Man” for a good number of days. What? I.P Man sounds like it could be a cool title. Like uh, “Babylon A.D”. So good job to the person who had the good sense and foresight to put “eep-mun” on the posters! And if my display of ignorance hasn’t scared you off yet, I’m now about to leave you smacking your forehead with the next few paragraphs I’m going to pass off as a review.
The movie is gorgeous. So gorgeous I had to italic the adjective. So gorgeous I’m here reduced to ranting about how good-looking it is. Ip Man, as fans of the genre and sport will tell you, is none other than the kung fu master of Bruce Lee. Did you digest that properly? He is the master of Bruce Lee. The man who taught his moves to a legend. Ip Man is his silver screen biography, set in China between the 1930s and 1940s. Disrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War, the movie gracefully puts into action the similar values shared by fellow enslaved countrymen and martial artists. Valor, honor, bravery, you know the drill. But who cares, it’s the fight scenes you’re after. And they are freaking good, which I’ve already mentioned.
What tops this is the pacing and direction of the film. Because the real Ip Man didn’t spend every single day of his life fighting evil dudes, the plot we’re talking about does not involve random baddies throwing themselves at him. Now, this is already a first step away from your adrenaline-type martial art movies, but Ip Man handles it well like a perfectly oiled machine. The movie moves along like some honorable master of its craft, easing into the action-y bits but never picking a fight it doesn’t require. So all the fight sequences you get to see mean something, and obvious and admirable effort have gone into choreographing and capturing each move. Japanese kung-fu, Wing Chun or boxing, Ip Man shows them off equally lethally. The tough part: pretending Donnie Yen’s Ip Man. Not that his performance is a disgrace or anything, it’s just… it’s Donnie Yen! It’s the same way nobody would believe Will Smith as a doctor, because he’s Will Smith.
Unlike the promise you get from Tony Jaa’s movies (No stunt doubles, no computer graphics, no strings attached!), there’ll be moments where you’d be left puzzled and suspicious of the art’s seemingly godly strikes. I’m not quite convinced the rapid punching wasn’t the result of fast-forwarding, myself. Nevertheless, this is good stuff, enough to take your adrenaline rushes for a walk before Ong Bak 2 knees us between the eyeballs next year, anyway.
(First published at InCinemas)
