Martial Arts Movie Mondays Recap: Ip Man

Ip Man (or The Ip Man Cometh as I affectionately think of it) is the second installment of my long running one week series: Martial Arts Movie Mondays. If a person needed to find 1 word to describe Ip Man it would be: fun. It was a fairly predictable tale of one man rising from the conquered: in this case the Chinese, to defy oppressors: the occupying Japanese army. The dialogue was not particularly interesting, although that could be due to poor subtitle translation. In general each character was fairly two-dimensional, although if we're being honest, martial arts movies aren't generally the place for complicated story arcs.

Ip Man is a great movie because of other points. Donnie Yen plays the titular character and he does an excellent job. Yen does the warrior-poet type very well, and he seamlessly handles a variety of different complex choreography challenges. There are several entertaining villains with varying Kung-Fu abilities and they all lose in spectacular fashion. Each one is fun to root against and it's very satisfying when they inevitably get their ass kicked. The final fight with the sinister Japanese general is just great. 

The one thing that actually annoyed me about this movie was its inconsistency with the main character's name. He is sometimes referred to as "Ip Man", and sometimes as "The Ip Man". Either his name is Ip Man or he is a man with the qualities of Ip, whatever that means. Now I'm just rambling, but watch the movie (it's on Netflix) and see if it doesn't bother you too.

Comment below with reactions or suggestions for other good martial arts flicks.