Monday, April 15, 2019

Master Z: Ip Man Legacy

I was kind of surprised to see a trailer for Ip Man 4 already attached to Master Z; I knew Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip were working on another entry, but August is a bit earlier than I was expecting to see it. The franchise is kind of stretched at this point, to the point where it's easier to be excited about the more purely fictional spin-off. It looks like we might wind up with two with Yen at Fantasia, then, with that and Enter the Fat Dragon both coming out around then.

One thing that's a bit when watching these movies is how I'm not sure who's a big star in China/Hong Kong and who isn't. Having seen Chrissie Chau in 29+1 a couple years ago, I kind of got the impression that she's a big star/lead there, but she's in fairly secondary roles in both the films she's currently got playing here and there.

One thing to note, at least in the Boston area: Though made in Hong Kong and listed as being in Cantonese on some sites, AMC's app has it in Mandarin, and there do seem to be some slight lip-sync issues, although as someone that doesn't speak either language, it's something I only noticed on occasion.

Yip Man ngoi juen: Cheung Tin Chi (Master Z: Ip Man Legacy)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2019 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

That Master Z took a few months to cross the Pacific means that the distributor was able to attach a preview for Ip Man 4 to this spinoff from the previous film in the series, and while it might just not be a great trailer, it wouldn't be surprising if fans were more enthused about seeing this track continue than the main one. Less boxed-in by history and blessed with a top-notch cast, this "Ip Man Legacy" film doesn't have quite so much weight on it and can just be good martial-arts action.

At the end of Ip Man 3, Wing Chun master Cheung Tin-Chi (Max Zhang Jin) fought the Grandmaster behind closed doors and lost decisively, and has since quit both teaching and acting as a fist for hire, instead opening a small grocery store and ensuring to be a good father. The fire never entirely left him, though, and when he comes across two women fleeing from the gang operating an opium den, he throws himself into the fight, making an enemy of Tso Sai Kit (Kevin Cheng Ka-Wing) in the process. A dangerous one - Kit opposes the plans of sister Tso Ngan Kwan (Michelle Yeoh) to take the family's crime organization straight, secretly joining forces with outwardly-charming American restaurateur Owen Davidson (Dave Bautista) to introduce heroin to Bar Street. And since that's where Tin-Chi has just taken a new job waiting tables for Fu (Xing Yu), one of Miss Kwan's former men… Well, it could get all kinds of ugly.

It's a classic sort of martial-arts movie plot, simple enough not to get in the way but with enough pieces that the filmmakers can mix and match a bit in the fight scenes. It works because everything in Master Z is better than you might expect for this sort of genre spinoff. Though the Ip Man films need to have at least a toehold in the real world even when being distorted into nationalist myth-making, this one can happily embrace the sort of bright, heightened aesthetics of the comic books that the Cheung's son Fung devours, and it seems freeing for director Yuen Wo-Ping, who (along with his action team led by Yuen Shun-Yi) stages a couple examples of the fight scenes that made him internationally famous. The neon sign fight, in particular, is the sort of physics-defying but impactful wire fu where he excels, and the whole film kicks into a higher gear when the punches start flying. Or even when they're not; a highlight of the film is watching Zhang and Yeoh pass a glass of whiskey back and forth without spilling it, adding something delightfully physical and visual to a scene where they're otherwise just probing each other with words.

Full review on EFilmCriticHong

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