Ip Man 2

Compared to the first movie, which was a biographical movie on the Wing Chun martial artist who tutored Bruce Lee, Wilson Yip’s more generously made sequel, “Ip Man 2,” released in 2011, is a lot of hits and misses.

Maggie Lee said in her review, “As martial arts choreography goes, one-on-one combat couldn’t get much better than the sheer moxie and prowess displayed by Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung (who co-stars and directs action).”

Lee continued, “However, those used to Yip’s black humor and his genre-bending quirks maybe slightly disappointed with the conventional screenplay, which milks people’s nostalgia for ‘70s kung-fu craze without taking the dramatic arc into newer directions. The nationalistic tone, tangled up with a dated underdog sentiment, is even more strident than the previous edition.”

In “Ip Man 2,” it changes from the Japanese-dominated Foshan in China to British-ruled Hong Kong. The first movie made Ip Man as a lenient, modest martial-arts teacher who always does resisting insults to fight, so the sequel is about him becoming a martial arts master.

After winning against the Japanese commander Miura in a public match, Ip Man and his family are really poor living in Hong Kong. He creates a school for Wing Chun on a rooftop, and takes on a group of working class young boys led by cocky but talented Wong Leung, played by Wang Xiaoming. However, Ip Man finds out that martial arts in Hong Kong is caught up in politics and corruption.

In order for him to be given permission to teach, he goes up against a more famous teacher Hong Chun-nam (Sammo Hung) and also has to fight in the boxing ring against Twister (Darren Shahlavi), a British champion who is supported by police supervisor Wallace (Charlie Mayer) to defend the dominance of white men.

Lee mentioned, “The dinner table has always appeared in Yip’s films as the locus of dramatic tension or character-revelation, as seen in Ip Man, Bullets over Summer and Juliet in Love. Here, he takes this auteurist touch to new heights by staging a duel between Ip and Hong in a restaurant, on top of a wobbly round table. Technically, every move is devised and shot with consummate skill. Its entertainment value easily trumps the climactic boxing match, where brute force and hard punches rule.”

Not only that, there’s also a part at the dinner table of very different emotion – when Ip Man is with Hong for a family dinner, giving the teacher a chance to show his soft, fatherly side of the student and how many people he must support.

We can see that Yen is at the height of his acting career. Lee said, “His prowess is staggering, but it is even more pleasurable to see his improving acting chops and the more sympathetic interplay between him and Hung than their previous appearance in Yip’s SPL.”

Supporting roles all have the feeling and humanity that Ip Man had shown in the first movie. However, none of them has the same sort of feeling that we see in the original. Lee said, “Shahlaviand Mayer compete in ham acting to be Most Obnoxious Racist Colonialist in the kung-fu canon, but one can hardly tell them apart – so alike are their growls and grimaces.”

Lee ended her review by saying, “From lingering close-ups of paraphernalia, like Ip’s ashtrays and his wife’s (Lynn Hsiong) biscuit-tin-cum-piggy-bank, ‘50s shop signs and posters, the meticulous art direction and tastefully saturated image colors provide a trip down memory lane for Hong Kong moviegoers.”

If you loved the first movie, you should definitely see this one. You will absolutely like it and fall in love with the franchise even more. Sure, the whole franchise is built around a pro-China vibe, but I think that’s normal in different countries movie industries. However, just see it for great acting, great story, and great fighting.

Look out next week for the next installment in “Ip Man Month.”