After I finished this I had to look a few things up. I never knew anything about Ip Man before watching the movie the other day, so seeing another movie about Ip Man seemed like too much of a coincidence. And it was; same guy. Bruce Lee's master. I guess I'm the last person to know.

Another thing I had to look up was about the Japanese occupation of Southern China during World War 2. I didn't know anything about China and Japan's involvement/activity during this period and I've read about it now and again had no idea that Nagasaki and Hiroshima were basically America going "OK cut it the fuck out, Japan". If that seems like I'm excusing it, it shouldn't. I just meant I didn't know about anything that preceded any of this. Obviously here we focus on what happened in Europe in WWII and I had no idea just how brutal and devastating the conflict was in China and how it ended up. I clearly need to find a podcast about this!

Anyway the film is OK. I'm not a huge fan of the grading. It seems like it's shot to look more natural for the time (greased lenses, soft focus) but then it's graded to be really dark and contrasty with lots of quick cuts, slow motion, angles to make the action look more frantic and intense. It's a bit of a mish-mash, visually.

And that runs with the narrative. It's difficult to judge things when they're on the subject of someone's life because life obviously doesn't follow a neat narrative structure, but this hops around from being about Ip Man and his path, to his relationship with Gong Er, and then her relationship with her father and Ma San, then back to her relationship with Ip Man, then a draw-the-rest-of-the-horse style montage that tells you about the rest of Ip Man's life. It's odd.

Zhang Ziyi is absolutely incredible though. Very emotional performance, incredible martial arts stunts. She seems to really inhabit the role, and outshines all of the other performances.

Overall an OK martial arts movie that lacks structure, is pretty light on action, and drags towards the end. Much preferred Ip Man to this.