The Legend Is Born: Ip Man

The Ip Man bar stays pretty high with Hong Kong director Herman Yau\'s unofficial prequel to the two films starring Donnie Yen. Using a mixture of Hong Kong and Mainland talent, this is at the classy end of the super-prolific Yau\'s spectrum, with richly-hued widescreen photography, good-looking costumes and a younger Yen look-alike in the main role who\'s utterly believable.

In fact, there\'s probably more fighting in The Legend Is Born than in the other two movies combined, as characters set to it at the drop of a hat rather than waste time shaking hands or talking. If Legend doesn\'t have the look of a \'60s/\'70s Hong Kong martial arts movie, it certainly has the social manners of one, and the choreography, supervised by producer/story writer/Wing Chun pupil Checkley Sin, is agile and inventive without resorting to modern-style visual effects or excessive wire-work.

The okay script by Erica Lee and the laundered but good-looking production/costume design spend some time, especially in the first half, sketching the gradual encroachment of westernisation, often in a fun way. A visit to a cinema to watch Nosferatu is one of the non-action highlights, and the use of English folk song Greensleeves as a love motif surprisingly works. Frequent date/place captions give the heavily fictionalised film a spurious biopic feel but, once the anti-Japanese plot warms up in the second half, the film\'s genre side takes over, leading to a superbly staged, two-part action finale. Interestingly, the Japanese aren\'t demonised, or overplayed, to such an extent as in Ip Man.

 

 

 

Derek ELLEY is Chief Film Critic of "Film Business Asia." Elley has been writing about East Asian cinema for over 35 years, especially Chinese-language films, and has arranged numerous seasons both in the U.K. and elsewhere. In 1998 he co-founded the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, devoted to mainstream Asian movies, and prior to joining "FBA" was senior film critic of U.S.-based entertainment trade paper "Variety".