So here’s a film that is both in the martial arts genre and is from Hong Kong, ticking off two boxes denoting other films we’ve watched recently. The Ip Man franchise is of course well known and commercially very successful spawning many sequels and spin-offs but we’ve mostly skipped them as they are formulaic and distasteful. I wanted to give this one a chance as foreign critics have praised it and it’s a spin-off about a character who was defeated by Ip Man in a previous film and so might be promising. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered as it’s just more of the same dreck.
After his defeat at Ip Man’s hands, Cheung Tin Chi closes his own martial arts school and lives a humble life as a shopkeeper with his son. However as these things go, trouble finds him when he intervenes in a fight between a thug Tso Sai Kit and Julia who is saving her friend Nana from being addicted to the gangster’s opium. The police breaks up the fight but Kit doesn’t let the grudge go and viciously attacks him at his shop burning it down. Tin Chi takes refuge at the bar owned by Julia’s brother Fu. Meanwhile Kit is also having troubles with his elder sister Kwan who wants to turn the gang into a legitimate enterprise. Kit resists doing so as he doesn’t want to be forever subordinate to his sister and instead goes into selling hard drugs. There’s also Owen Davidson, the bulky British owner of a posh restaurant in town and leader of the local chamber of commerce. He is outwardly kind and respectable but it’s not much of a spoiler to say that he’s the mastermind of the drugs operation that ultimately Tin Chi must defeat.
The good thing about this film is that it’s sumptuously shot and features some serious star power. The producers clearly put a lot of effort into recreating a popular Hong Kong bar street of the era in all of its neon-studded glory. They’re visibly studio sets but look quite impressive nonetheless. The vibrant, rich colors of the film’s palette were chosen to accentuate this glitz, even down to the makeup on the performers which unfortunately makes it a little too obvious that they’re wearing heavy make-up. I have no idea why Michelle Yeoh agreed to appear in this relatively low status project and she is phoning it in a little here but she does instantly elevate the tone of the film. Then there’s Dave Bautista who is not exactly known as a great actor in Hollywood and hilariously outacts all of the Hong Kong actors around him. It’s glorious.
The downside is that pretty much everything is either mediocre or awful. The martial arts choreography here is still better than what most Hollywood productions can achieve but the overuse of wire-fu gives the fights a flighty quality that is very annoying. The plot relies on the tired old tropes of evil and corrupt white men and the Chinese heroes who stand up to them with no new twists at all. Character development is non-existent and the way they desperately try to use Tin Chi’s son to elicit some sympathy is downright cringe-worthy. The only vaguely interesting bit of characterization is Nana’s claim that she finds the glitzy glamor of the bar street beautiful and that she finds it empowering to sing on the stage. Yet that is at odds with Tin Chi’s obvious distaste for the scene as demeaning and tawdry entertainment for white people. Reconciling the two viewpoints would have been worthwhile but of course the film never touches upon it again.
It’s pretty clear that my verdict on this is a firm thumbs-down. I wasn’t a big fan of the Donnie Yen Ip Man films that I did watch but those at least had some memorable fight scenes that made them distinctive and meme-worthy. This side story is markedly worse as it has next to no redeeming qualities and Max Zhang makes for a far inferior lead actor. Watching this was a complete waste of time.