Simply, Ip Man is a great pure martial arts movie. Everything that’s right about the genre is present here and, for my money, that makes this one a keeper.
Directed by Wilson Yip (SPL) and starring Donnie Yen, one of the greatest screen fighters of all time, The film tells the story of the Wing Chun master (and teacher to Bruce Lee) and does so in a wildly appealing style.
Appealing? Why, you ask? Fights, baby. Fights. Intricate, bone-crunching and impeccably filmed, the fights in this film are as good as screen fights can be. For someone like me who got into this stuff because of the incredible fight and stunt work done in the 1980s and early 1990s, seeing the tight choreography on display here was a real joy. While the wuxia flavored, art-house favorites like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers and the effects heavy, comic book stories like The Storm Riders and Seven Swords are absolutely adored here at DrunkenFist manor, they don’t really produce the same visceral impact that a film like this does. With the recent exception of Jet Li’s Fearless, that impact has really been missing since 1994, the end of the last great martial arts movie boom.
Ip Man fills that void admirably.
A large part of that is, of course, due to the incredible skill of Donnie Yen Ji Dan. A long-time favorite around these parts (and for more than the fact that he was gracious enough to give me hours of his time when I was writing about this stuff professionally,) Donnie absolutely owns the screen in this film. Always one of the most physically gifted performers in the industry Donnie continues to produce world class action year after year. Here’s hoping we can coax another five or ten years out of him at this level.
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