Donnie Yen is back as Ip Man one last time (maybe).
By Josh Lasser
Prominently named on posters and in the synopsis of the newest entry in the Ip Man franchise, Ip Man 3, is none other than Mike Tyson. The former boxer is a curious inclusion in the film as Ip Man 2 heavily focused on putting boxing up against Kung Fu. To build the next movie’s big fight around the same concept would be a letdown, but if you’re casting Mike Tyson as a villain in your movie, you’re going to want him to box.
Fortunately, Tyson’s villainous real estate mogul, Frank, is a side-show in the movie and not the main event. Instead, Donnie Yen’s third appearance as the Wing Chun martial artists master who taught Bruce Lee is focused elsewhere.
Taking place in 1959, Ip Man 3 finds Ip Man well established in Hong Kong and raising his youngest child with his wife, Wing-Sing (Lynn Xiong, also reprising her role from the first two Ip Man movies). However, land is valuable and Frank wants the land under the school Ip Man’s youngest son attends. Frank doesn’t know Ip Man’s son goes there; it is simply a coincidence.
Also a coincidence is the fact a man named Cheung Tin-Chi (Max Zhang), another Wing Chun expert, has a son at the school. A rickshaw driver, Cheung dreams of opening his own Wing Chun school and while he initially seems to admire Ip Man, Cheung needs to make money and finds himself doing the bidding of Frank’s underling, Ma King-Sang (Patrick Tam), including helping Sang eliminate people who would get in the way of Frank’s development plans.
Yes, there’s another coincidence or two there and combined, these coincidences take an already rather well-worn story and further weaken it. A kidnapping of school children later in the movie will only have those not heavily invested in the action sequences wondering whether the film’s marketing uses the old “this time it’s personal,” which in the case of the Ip Man films ought to become “this time it’s even more personal… again.”
The movie also manages to include extra drama between Ip Man and Wing-Sing, as the repeated struggle Ip Man has balancing his dedication to his work and his time with his family comes to a head. This does feel like the culmination of the marital portion of the tale told across the trilogy, but the way in which it proceeds, whether based in the real world or not, also feels like well trod territory.
The worst crime, story-wise, is not any of that, but rather the film’s inability to make Cheung a terribly sympathetic character. A rickshaw driver who clearly struggles with what is right and wrong, who seems to just want to be able to provide something more and better for his son, Cheung eventually turns full villain in a way that isn’t well explained. It is required that this happen in the film in order for the story to move forward, setting up an inevitable showdown between Ip Man and Cheung, but the way it happens is still perplexing.
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By far, this is the weakest tale of the three Ip Man movies, but the action sequences more than begin to make up for that. Sammo Hung, who was the action director on the first two films, is not back this time out. In his place is Yuen Woo-Ping. No single fight in the movie approaches the wonder of the table top fight in Ip Man 2, but several come exceptionally close, including a wonderful sequence at the docks, another in a medical facility, and the final battle itself.
Whether it is the change from Sammo Hung to Yuen Woo-Ping as the action director, the five-year span between Ip Man 2 and Ip Man 3, or something else, there does seem to be a difference in the way Yen’s character fights this time out. Several of the fights in the first two films show Ip Man executing moves with minimal effort. He seems in those moments almost half-asleep, knowing in advance what his opponent is going to do next and countering it. Here, while he can still take out a bad guy without much trouble, it never feels quite as nonchalant as it does in the earlier films.
