Chinese film industry continue turning their most beloved martial arts historical figures into pulp characters, sometimes even bordering on the superhero genre, but overall looking to exploit this figures beyond of what they really were, to bring them to the olympus of legends, where the wide variety of possibilities is unlimited, and all them stop being historical figures to transform into fictitional characters that inhabit universes that those kung fu masters could never imagine, bringing to moviegoers around the world endless hours of evasive entertainment.
Since Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen teamed up to turn Ip Man in a cinematic hero, the character has become a recurrent figure for martial cinema of late that comes from the mainland, and alongside another historical masters as Wong Fei Hung or Huo yuanjia, has reached the status of eternal cinematic iconic hero.
For Ip Man: Kung Fu Master, Dennis To reprises the main role on this adventure in which the character is presented as Foshan’s police officer, a real fact on his biography barely covered in other portrayals of the character, but that here becomes the main axis of the story placing him in the battle against opium druglords and corruption that derivates in a final showdown against the eternal enemy on classic kung fu flicks, the evil Japanese imperial army.
On this adventure, they resort on highlighting all the signs of identity of what we could call “Ip manverse” or “Ip man exploitation”, from Donnie Yen’s Ip man’s way of fighting, to try to recreate Wong Kar Wai´s beautiful cinematic kung fu sequences under the rain in “The Grandmasters”, also bringing to the equation, a homage to Bruce Lee’s kato or Donnie Yen’s Chen Zhen.
But above all, this “Ip Man, Kung Fu Master” is a thrilling non-stop action kung fu spectacle, in which the character becomes a one-man army or even a mighty superhero to lead a battle for his people with kung fu as ultimate weapon of truth and justice, succesfuly achieving its goals to knockout his multiple opponents and bring good doses of enjoyment to the viewers.
Ip Man: Kung Fu Master will make its way to the UK on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital beginning April 19. Learn more here.