Ip Man: The Final Fight (2013) movie description: The hottest character in movies right now is Ip Man, the wing chun master who moved from Mainland China to Hong Kong after World War II and took on Bruce Lee as his student. Donnie Yen changed his career starring as Ip Man in two movies, and there have been a dozen others, but this flick is Herman Yau’s love letter to Hong Kong, a warts and all portrait of its history. It isn’t about individual heroism but an Occupy Hong Kong surge of street protests, labor strikes, anti-colonial politics, and fist-pumping radicalism.
Anthony Wong, director Yau’s favorite collaborator, plays Ip Man not as a legend but as a middle aged immigrant who comes to Hong Kong to rebuild his life. He’s not a martial arts superhero, just a man eking out a living with his skills, a guy who saves rusty cups from the garbage. The film focuses on the poverty that warps the lives of he and his students: a union organizer (Timmy Hung, Sammo Hung’s son) caught up in the anti-British labor movement, a Chinese cop (Jordan Chan, Chicken in the Young & Dangerous films) who chooses corruption as his path through the ranks of the colonial police force, and a struggling dim sum girl (Gillian Chung, of the superstar pop duo TWINS).
