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Up until now, my favourite films have centred around the legendary Ip Man. However, IP MAN 3 was the first one that I watched on the big screen. Honestly, this one really baffled me. I watched it in a multiplex cinema with only four other viewers in the audience. Somehow I feel like sending AMC a thank you card.
After a long wait of three years, Donnie Yen has reprised one of his monumental roles as the legendary real-life Wing Chun disciple, Ip Man, who most of us know as the teacher of Bruce Lee. Director Wilson Yip and writer Edmond Wong are back too Choreographer Sammo Hung is not working on the movie anymore, but he has been replaced by the terrific Yuen Woo Ping. The strange part about that is that Yuen was the one who directed Wong Kar Wai’s rival Ip Man movie The Grandmaster.
The plot of Part 2 takes place in the early 1950s when Ip Man and his family relocate to Hong Kong. There, he establishes a Wing Chun school. Now the year is 1959, where he still resides with his wife (once again, charmfully portrayed by Lynn Hung) and youngest son in a modest apartment. While we don’t see him teaching in class, it seems like he is still maintaining a passionate engagement with his pupils as he has not lost his steadfast disciples. Now, on the other hand, he seems to be in trouble with both his wife and the kid’s school (not a fighting school, but a math and reading type school) for burning the midnight oil all the time.
Once again this tale features a public challenge to a local legend from a martial arts teacher searching to assert dominance over local martial arts grandmasters. This time, however, it’s not a rival style to Wing Chun. It’s a guy who claims that he does Pure Wing Chun and that Ip Man is only a fraudulent seller Wang Chun. He might be messing with the wrong person. Yes, I am talking about IP man. This man is equally sympathetic as he is an antagonist and to be fair, I didn’t expect him to be this character.
For a while, he has not. Like in THE GRANDMASTER, Ip Man meets Sum Nung (Jin Zhang) after the headmasters of the children’s school they both attend summon their parents after a brawl that brags too much about kicking each other’s butt. The children antagonize each other and the fathers have reasons to meet. Both of them arrive late at the principal’s office. Ip Man argues that work is far more important than any other obligation. (And when he says it, it seems very obvious, but you’ll hear it differently later on) Each one taught his son to fight. They come from the same lineage as Wing Chun, they all end up fighting to defend the school against the gangsters that want the land it is built on. Nung’s pride is what causes them to have a challenging fight, and just like their kids being disrespectful, mustered up his WIP. There’s no real way to say this, but all of these movies boil down to the same thing these little boys getting dicks on a playground.
Ip Man 3 defies all odds and is extremely informative. The character in this movie is egoless and does not have the urge to show one’s back and retain aggression. One of the features that Ip Man shows to people around him is that he is ready to swallow any of his undue pride and apologize for it even when the fault is resting on other people’s shoulders. He does this not only with the people who try to pick a fight with him but also with his wife who slaps him and screams at him in anger.
He begins, “I apologize It was my error.” He almost routinely exclaims afterwards, “I am sorry.” His stance is not as cringe, rather, it can be perceived as someone who is willing to take the blame to create peace.
As the challenge unfolds and all the people students, the press, and local masters are going crazy over Ip Man defending his legacy, he comes to realize that his wife is in poor health. Instead of making any effort to help his wife, he states that he would prefer to go and dance. This is a very standard Hong Kong melodrama as the wife is only seen being let down by Ip Man’s long work hours, feeling a tummy ache, and then eventually learning that she has cancer. Instead of showing the effects of the disease, we are mostly treated to images of her looking sad, but still appearing quite pretty. Even so, the weight of the three other movies tugs them with enough force that it is very sad, as much as the cliched lesson about family and the obvious in this day and age.
He’s definitely the most relaxed out of the familiar martial arts figures. Yen (who is supposed to be around 66 years old now, but somehow does not seem aged much since the other movies) is really impressive in these movies because in addition to executing wonderful fight scenes in a particular style, he was supposed to learn, but also because he performs in a character that is different from every other of his movies. Pay attention to his face during the fights. That’s not Donnie Yen’s face, it’s his version of Ip Man’s face. Let’s go.
Before it turns into a challenging movie it’s yet another rooted action movie recipe one man single-handedly fighting against a group of gangsters using brute force to intimidate people to take their belongings. As the neighbourhood’s greatest hero, it’s up to Ip Man to intervene when thugs are attacking the principal, boarding up the school and even setting it ablaze. Sometimes backed up by his disciples, sometimes by Tin-chi or his mentor Master Tin (Ka-Yan Leung, TRUE LEGEND, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS), he repeatedly finds himself in impossibly large sets of gangsters, and one man is too far away to help. In this case, he doesn’t just use armlocks. He uses poles and blades in this.
Some of the best battles are those that are a bit more personal. He’s standing in an elevator with his wife when suddenly a large Thai boxer (punches) him (Sarut Khanwilai, Tony Jaa’s stunt double from SKIN TRADE). So, this is how he fights with her: the thunderous elbows and blends of fists fill the elevator space and are seconds away from smashing into his wife. Ip Man shoves him off the elevator and locks his wife inside. After he’s done, he unlocks it again and takes her out. She does not have to witness it.
In that combat, there’s a very long take that is a cool overhead shot of fighting down a few sets of stairs. Personally, I think that there is some decent use of staircases and bannisters in these fights, reminding me of an iconic Yuen Woo Ping creation, Beatrix riding the bannister in the house of blue leaves.
This was released in 3D in Hong Kong and, considering the number of gimmick shots it has, I bet that was pretty fun. There are shots like the one where a cigarette is kicked toward the camera in slow motion. In the pole fight, both fighters make sure to aim their sticks at the camera. There’s a significant chop to the eye sequence that’s executed with the fingers flying towards our eyes.
Apparently, there’s some buzz regarding this being the Ip Man instalment that tackles him teaching Bruce Lee. The last time he saw him he was a cocky little kid that wanted to learn Wing Chun but was told he was too young by Ip Man which is historically inaccurate. In this version, he comes back asking to learn, now played by Kwok-Kwan Chan The Bruce Lee look-alike goalie from Shaolin Soccer and star of the TV series The Legend of Bruce Lee. But, unlike the portrayals in The Legend of Ip Man, they don’t make him a co-star, instead, he simply appears in a handful of scenes that references his “be like water” quote, cha-cha dancing and wiping the nose with a knuckle.
The more significant co-star is Mike Tyson as the gang boss. His role as the ‘foreign devil’ Frank is devoid of any need for acting, and his Cantonese lines are (rather awkwardly) dubbed over by someone, perhaps himself. His fight with Ip Man is the pinnacle of the movie. For Ip Man, the fight is dangerous because of Tyson’s size, build, and his past of demolishing people with his fists. It looks a lot like a sharp kitchen knife trying to duel with a crude sledgehammer.
Frank is evil, but as with most bad guys in martial arts films, he fights well and there is some code of honour to him, therefore it’s more like a competition than a fight. This fight takes place in his office. He sets an alarm clock before the fight, telling Ip Man that if he manages to last three minutes, he will set him free. As expected, he makes it three minutes. Frank simply turns off the clock. He does not utter a single word.
While fighting, Frank calms down to swing on his opponent, Ip Man while shattering a row of windows. It shows his little girl in a room below as bits of glass rain down around her. She is sitting there blissfully unaware as she holds a balloon completely ignorant of the violent chaos raging above her and of the glass fragments around her. Then, one of the shards of glass gently drifts down and cuts the string on her balloon, causing it to float to Alexandria’s rafters. Her eyes filled with wonder.
It brings a certain violence to innocence. In a different context, these sequences could emerge from the imagination of a child, as many of Sam Peckinpah’s films do. During the final duel, there is a cut to the two sons of the fighters looking at their fathers from the top of the stairs. There is a shocking spoon-to-a-knives scratching a board as one boy screams. Not in one of fear, but the awful noise a child might make while annoyed and desperate for the sound to stop. They are really not able to make sense of it.
I find that I like this third part best of the official IP Man trilogy (although I prefer THE GRANDMASTER over those), and if it is to end up being the last, that will certainly feel strange, because it is more like a middle part rather than a conclusion. All said it is a movie that I did enjoy. Well, you can take my word for it and just stop there, or, if I may, I want to SPOIL an amazing moment near the end so that I can demonstrate how much I enjoy these films. Nung, a rickshaw driver who comes from nowhere, shifts into a James Dean-esque persona, he is cool. Unfortunately, though, he drops out of school and turns into an egomaniac, he turns into a character as sudden as Anakin Skywalker or Tommy “The Machine” Gunn. He is so obsessed with being the best that he commissions a fancy sign to parade around ‘GRANDMASTER OF WING CHUN’ before he even starts his public match with Ip Man.
Eventually, they get their match, and of course, the old man wins. Cut to a shot of the Grandmaster sign being broken in half.
That is thrilling for many reasons. One of them is the sign breaking in FIST OF FURY, one of the greatest movies in our cinematic history. When the camera pulls back, we see Ip Man fighting in the dojo, and he doesn’t appear to break the sign. But, of course, it’s not him. He’s never cared about that stuff. It’s Tin-chi himself accepting defeat, sportsmanship, honour, priceless.
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