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Released by: Well Go USA
Released on: November 12th, 2013.
Director: Herman Yau
Cast: Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang, Gillian Chung, Jordan Chan
Year: 2013
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The Movie:
Following his 2011 film The Legend Is Born: Ip Man, director Herman Yau returns to that well once again, this time casting frequent collaborator Anthony Wong in the lead role in 2013's Ip Man: The Final Fight, a picture that rides the coattails of the movies that came before it but which at least attempts something a little different by focusing on Ip Man's later years. Wong isn't the young man he once was, and he proves to be well cast in this picture even if he isn't likely to be the first guy you think of if casting a martial arts master.
Set in the Hong Kong of the 1960s, we once again catch up with Ip Man as moves to the island with his wife, Wing-Sing (Anita Yuen), and meets an up and coming kung fu master named Leung Sheung (Timmy Hung). Though Leung spends his days working for the restaurant union, he wants to bring his martial arts to the next level and so he asks Ip Man to take him on as a student. Ip Man doesn't have the space he needs to really set up a proper school but Leung helps him out and soon enough he's setup a training area on the roof of a restaurant. With everything he needs now in place, he brings on a few more students, chief amongst them Tang Sing (Jordan Chan), Lee King (Luxia Jiang) and Sei-Mui (Gillian Chung).
As things start to look like they're on the upswing, Wing-Sing decides to move back to the mainland just as a competing school run by Ng Chung (Eric Tsang) starts to make trouble. Now alone in Hong Kong, he starts becoming the object of affection for a pretty young woman named Jenny (Zhou Chu-Chu), who he saved from some thugs earlier on. Things start to get even more complicated when a gangster named Dragon (Xiong Xin-Xin) tries to get some of Ip Man's students to participate in some illegal underground fighting. Ip Man soon realizes that his personal philosophy of Wing Chun doesn't necessarily translate as well as he would like it to in Hong Kong, where the times are changing very quickly…
An interesting mix of the martial arts action you'd expect and some poignant social commentary, Ip Man: The Final Fight obviously follows the legendary martial arts master as he gets older and fills in some of the blanks in regards to his later years. Here we see a man who is in many ways out of touch with his surroundings, whose old fashioned methods and belief system is at odds with the countless corrupt police officers and self-centered gangsters who seem to run Hong Kong. As he adapts to his surroundings, he does his best to remain an anchor for his students, holding onto the ideals that he's been teaching for decades now, though there are times in the movie where you can see that this is not easy for him.
Wong, who underwent some specific martial arts training for this role, is quite good as the lead here. In a part pretty far removed from the nasty character's he's best known for in earlier Herman Yau collaborations like The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome, he's got a sense of balance here that suits the character well. While we don't get bombarded with the ridiculously intense action scenes that highlight the Donnie Yen films made earlier, we do see Wong strike when the plot calls for it and he does so quite convincingly. The rest of the cast also do well. Yau paces the movie efficiently, almost too efficiently in that he covers a lot of years in about a hundred minutes worth of time, but the production values are strong and the movie always looks good. This might not differ from the other Ip Man movies that have been churned out over the last few years, in fact at this point they more or less seem to be following a tried and true formula, but Ip Man: The Final Fight is well made, well-acted and contains a few decent action scenes. If you've enjoyed the earlier films, it stands to reason you'll enjoy this one as well.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The AVC encoded 2.39.1 widescreen 1080p high definition picture on this disc is excellent. Detail is strong, colors are reproduced really nicely, with some interesting emphasis on primary colors to nice effect in a few scenes. Black levels are nice and deep throughout the presentation. Generally the transfer excels in areas of both detail and texture. There are no issues at all with dirt, debris or visual detriments of any kind and the disc (the movie was shot digitally) is well authored, showing no noise reduction or heavy edge enhancement. Outside of some slight shimmer here and there, the movie looks excellent in high definition.
The main audio option on the disc is a Cantonese language track provided in DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio with removable subtitles available in English only. The lossless track here is a good one, though there isn't quite as much rear channel activity as you might expect. The score is spread around perfectly with some nice pans thrown in for dramatic effect while bass response is consistent tight and strong. All in all, this is a nice, well directed mix that does a fine job with the movie. An optional Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo Surround Sound mix is also included, again in Cantonese.
There aren't a ton of extras here but aside from menus and chapter selection we also get two trailers for the feature and a ten minute long behind the scenes featurette that includes some brief comments from the cast and crew as well as some footage shot on the set during production. We also get twenty minutes of cast and crew interviews including some input from leading man Anthony Wong. A few previews for other Well Go USA properties play before the main menu loads and the Blu-ray case comes housed inside a cardboard slipcase featuring identical cover art.
The Final Word:
Is this movie really showing us anything we haven't seen already in the last three Ip Man movies? Nope, not really, but Anthony Wong is really good in the lead, good enough in fact that he makes it worth seeing, and a few decent fight scenes help in that regard as well. Well Go USA's Blu-ray looks and sounds very good and features a couple of decent extras too. This doesn't impress the way the two Donnie Yen movies do, but it's still pretty decent.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
