Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster (2010)

Master, You Really Can Fight Ten Men at Once.

As I come towards the end of my first year of reviews, I came to realize that I had started a few things that I had left unfinished.  The first one I realized was a movie I had reviewed, but had not reviewed the sequel.  And, I coincidentally noticed it because I felt like watching the movie again.  I had reviewed the first movie back in November, and I also raved about it being one of the better martial arts movies in recent history.  Solid storytelling mixed with fantastic fight scenes and some good performances as well.  I had been told about how that one was a great martial arts movie so I decided to give it a watch, but I accidentally watched the lesser prequel instead.  I still liked the prequel so much that I instantly went out and purchased the first movie and today’s movie.  How did that work out for me?  We’ll find out in my review of Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster, written by Edmond Wong, directed by Wilson Yip, and starring Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Darren Shahlavi, Huang Xiaoming, Lynn Hung, Charles Mayer, Kent Cheng, Fan Siu-wong, To Yu-hang, Ngo Ka-nin, Simon Yam, Calvin Cheng, Lo Mang, Fung Hak-on, and Brian Burrell.

After the events of the first movie, the Wing Chun martial arts master Ip Man (Donnie Yen) moves with his family to Hong Kong to open a school.  At first, it’s slow going, but then a young man named Wong Leung (Huang Xiaoming) comes along and becomes his student, and soon more follow.  And with these new students comes trouble when Wong Leung gets held hostage after getting into a fight with members of another martial arts school.  When Ip Man goes to rescue him, he comes into contact with Hung Chun-nam (Sammo Hung), who tells Ip Man that he must fight the other masters before he can teach in Hong Kong.  Also, a western boxer named Taylor “The Twister” Milos (Darren Shahlavi) is coming to Hong Kong for an exhibition, and that’ll probably turn into something as well.

One could argue that Ip Man 2 suffers from roughly the same problems as most martial arts movies, but it also benefits from the same things they do.  The story is pretty basic.  It’s a fantasy version of Yip Man’s actual life, taking things that are told about the man and amping them up so that they’ll make for an interesting martial arts movie, and it accomplishes that very well.  It boils down to two fairly common stories from martial arts movies put together.  It starts off as the regular old “My Martial Arts is Better Than Your Martial Arts” storyline that is the root of so many martial arts movies.  Then it turns into an equally as common “West vs. East” storyline to round out the movie.  All stuff fans of the genre have seen before.  They have a little bit of a personal story going on with Ip Man and his family, and the threats of his poverty, but none of that’s really mined for emotion.  They do spend enough time with each character that we’re supposed to care about, so I guess they can be lauded for that.

What they really deserve to be lauded for is the martial arts.  I love the fight scenes in the Ip Man series.  They’re all spectacular.  I still think the fight with 10 guys from the first movie is the best fight scene in the series, but there are still plenty quality ones to be found in this movie.  The first big fight in the fish market pretty spectacular because of the number of people involved, but the choreography of the 10 man fight still impressed me more.  The same goes for the fight with the various martial arts masters on the table later in the movie.  Pretty cool, interesting idea, but not quite up to the high bar they already set.  A good contender would be the final fight with “The Twister” Milos.  It was the only fight that it seemed that Ip Man could possibly lose.  Granted, you know he’ll win because he’s the hero, but you need a little danger or emotion to really get a fight up to spectacular status.  It’s still always a pleasure to watch Donnie Yen do that machine gun style punching he does as Ip Man.  I could watch a .gif of that all day long.

The performances all do their parts nicely, but it never really requires that much out of them.  Donnie Yen performs his few moments of emotion very well, but who really cares about that?  He punches faces great.  I had the same problem with Lynn Hung as I had in the first movie in that she was always a bummer and a buzzkill, but she wasn’t around that often.  Sammo Hung is always interesting to me.  He just does not look like a guy that should be a martial arts star, but the guy knows what he’s doing.  He’s really good at directing action as well.  I’ve usually liked his work.  Like in Game of Death when he had a similar fight to the one he has in this one where he’s outmatched by the white dude, but this time it actually had significance to the story.  Darren Shahlavi could be knocked for being over the top in his portrayal of the bad guy, Taylor “The Twister” Milos, but it’s kind of what the role calls for.  We have to hate this guy, and we wouldn’t really hate him too badly if he accidentally killed someone in a fair fight that he had not started.  He’s got to be a sociopath that starts all the fights by randomly hating Chinese people, and then he’s got to beat one to death with his hands and try to cheat later on.  Now we can hate you.  They even have a bit in the end of the movie where a little boy shows up as Bruce Lee, who Yip Man actually trained.  The kid goes a little overboard with the Bruce Lee impersonation, but he does look eerily like I imagine Bruce Lee would at that age.

Ip Man 2 is still a really good martial arts movie.  I’d say that the first movie was probably better, but both of them have solid stories, both of them have solid performances, and both of them offer fantastic fight scenes.  I’d say that the first movie proves itself a little bit better in the fight category, but this one does not disappoint.  If you’re a fan of the martial arts genre, this is a movie you should see.  You could do worse than watching it even if you’re not a fan of the genre.  I have this movie on BluRay, and I’ll let you figure out where you can find it if you want to watch it.  Not like Netflix or RedBox are paying me.  Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster gets “No need to tell me all this.  Let’s just fight” out of “Doesn’t matter.  He’s better than you anyway.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Flash Point (2007)

The Point at Which Flashing Happens

I believe today is the first time I’ve received a request from my friend Drewchum.  Drewchum is an Asian, so it’s not farfetched to think that the movie he would request would be a martial arts movie.  It’s also not farfetched to think that he just thought about the Pokémon Farfetch’d when I typed that sentence.  Despite my incredible whiteness, I have long been a fan of the martial arts genre of movies, so this was a request I was more than happy to grant.  And the fact that it was available on Netflix streaming only helped the matter.  And the star of this movie is one of my favorite martial artists that’s in prime condition enough to still put out good martial arts movies!  So let’s get into my review of Flash Point, written by Szeto Kam Yuen, directed by Wilson Yip, and starring Donnie Yen, Louis Koo, Collin Chou, Ray Lui, Xing Yu, Fan Bingbing, Kent Cheng, Xu Qing, and Teresa Ha.

Detective Sergeant Ma Jun (Donnie Yen) is working with his undercover partner Wilson (Louis Koo) to take down three drug dealing brothers: Archer (Ray Lui), Tony, (Collin Chou), and Tiger (Xing Yu).  Ma is an unconventional and aggressive cop, but he gets results.  See, even China has clichés.  The brothers are starting to make moves against rival gangs ultimately reaching the point where Tiger tries to kill one of the rival gang leaders with a knife, but Wilson intervenes.  The gang leader survives and agrees to testify against the brothers.  During an attempt to collect their money to flee, Archer is arrested while Wilson’s cover is blown to Tony and Tiger.  Wilson is badly injured when Tony hits him with a car, but he survives.  With the brothers still trying to kill Wilson, Ma must try to protect Wilson while still trying to take down the drug dealers.  But can he do that while still playing by his own rules?!

I’ve been noticing a disappointing trend in the newer age of martial arts movies.  I don’t know if it’s an attempt to copy American movies, or to get noticed in America, or if directors are just getting more artsy fartsy in the Orient, but a lot of martial arts movies are focusing a lot more on story recently than on the action.  That’s right; I called this a disappointing trend.  I want there to be some story when I go into a martial arts movie, but it really doesn’t need to be much more than a reason for the hero to want to punch the face of the villain.  All I need is, “You killed my brother.  Prepare to die.”  What I don’t need to see is the early stages of Wilson’s relationship with his girlfriend, their depressing dates, and them spooning together.  I also don’t need a lot of the random goofy things that they waste time with, such as the random group of old people who wanted to jump in the beach but were not supposed to for some reason (I couldn’t read the sign that probably would have said why in Chinese), or the group of the cops that were playing in a band, with Donnie Yen on the bass drum.  If you’re thinking these two things have absolutely nothing to do with the movie, you’re right.  And what’s worse is the fact that these stupid things and regular parts of the story make the action spread pretty thin.  To the movie’s credit, when the martial arts start in the movie, they’re pretty awesome.  I get the feeling that the fight choreographer just found out about MMA and said, “The world needs to see this shit!  …Y’know, more than they currently do on TV.”  But combining the movie choreography experience of the Asian martial arts movie scene with mixed martial arts has potential, and it’s realized here.  They use a lot of stuff that MMA fans will notice, such as Jiu-Jitsu, boxing, kickboxing trapping and knees to the head, ground and pound, side mount and knees to the ribs, etc.  It all worked really well.  The problem with it was how far apart it was spread.  It starts off with a couple of fairly short fights, has a couple of gun fights and a few car chases and collisions, but doesn’t really come around until the end of the movie.  The very end of the movie is a good collection of action that I had been waiting patiently for through the rest of the movie.  Some cool and stylized gun fights and a very satisfying concluding fight between Ma and Tony.  A lot of cool uses of MMA and wrestling and was what I had been waiting for, but I did think the conclusion of the fight was less than satisfying.  Before that, the only fight worth mentioning happened about 10 minutes earlier when Ma fought Tiger.  The chase leading up to it was pretty cool and bordered on Parkour.  There was even a part where Ma ran along a wall like the Prince of Persia games.  And he suplexed that mother fucker!  I don’t see that nearly enough since I stopped watching WWE.  So, basically, the only thing I truly want to see in a martial arts movie is martial arts, and it’s far too spread out for my taste.  When it happened it was great, but we need to focus up on what we’re good at here and not try to force story into movies that don’t really require it.

I honestly feel like I was barely paying attention to the performances in this movie.  This’ll be a quickie.  I love Donnie Yen.  He’s always a total badass, and able to pull off many different forms of martial arts in movies.  Very versatile, and a pretty decent actor as well.  Louis Koo seemed mopey half the time.  Collin Chou was vaguely intimidating.  Ray Lui and Sing Yu tried too hard.  Fan Bingbing has a funny name, but she was pretty cute in the movie.  Not just physically, but her personality was pretty cute too.  I’m mainly thinking about one scene in the movie when she was laid up in a hospital with her leg in a sling and Louis Koo said something like, “Don’t go anywhere,” and she bobbed her leg up and down in the sling.  It was cute.  And that’s all I’ve got.

Flash Point is a movie that wasn’t able to resonate with me because they focused too much on story.  The story didn’t wind up being anything all that impressive and when you compound that with the fact that the story spread out the action too thin.  When it was there, it was pretty great, but there was just too little of it for me.  Not a bad watch, but there’s some better movies you could watch.  Ip Man, for instance.  But if you’re looking for a martial arts movie, there’s worse ways to spend your time on Netflix streaming.  Flash Point gets “Robert want more punchface!” out of “I need a place to find more movie quotes…”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.