Smacking fights!

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2017)

The fights are what make this movie good. I'm not a kung fu-movie expert but I have seen my fair share and in my opinion, Ip Man has the most intense, convincing and bone-breaking fighting sequences you can expect. Huge variety and crazy speed, and on top of that, something that I think really takes the experience up a notch or two, the sounds. The hard smacking sound of the hits really stands out from the usual Hollywood thumps. It brings an edge of reality to the otherwise "unreal" fights. You will feel the pain!
The story is heavily fictionalized, it draws inspiration from the real life character of Ip Man and the fact that he lived during a time of Japanese occupation. It makes for a great underdog story as Ip Man comes to embody the Chinese peoples defiance against the Japanese, but it has little grounding in reality. This is completely fine, as long as you do not expect a documentary.
I have two beefs with this movie. One is the, at times, jarring story development. It might be a pet peeve of mine but I very much dislike it when the story is all of the sudden disrupted by words across the screen explaining why everything is suddenly different (Japanese occupation). I don't want to read it, I want to see it happen! Naturally! I understand that the movie, within its limited time frame, cannot show years of development but there are better ways to make time line jumps. This is lazy writing, it disengages you from the story and I suspect it might be a general problem with Chinese biopics (thinking of 1911, a horrible movie and a great example of this problem).
My other problem is the way too big amount of one-dimensional characters. Ip Man and the cop-guy were the only ones who showed any kind of character development. The rest were shallow stereotypes who served their one particular function and nothing else. It made the movie super predictable and as a result it really diminishes the replay value for me.
Ip Man and the fighting scenes made this, otherwise boring movie, great!