2 out of 5

Director:  Herman Yau

Asian cinema is generally more tonally mixed than our good ol’ American clear-cut genres, but ‘Final Fight’ (the followup to another Yau Ip Man film, ‘The Legend is Born’) stretches it to a point of incompetence, where the jumbled styles and moods don’t knit together well and make for some slow stretches in a relatively slim 1 hr 40 min. film.  Into its center, the movie does settle into a kind of campy extra-real narrative, and once you get used to it the flick picks up, but the billion plot lines must spiral out into dramatics once again and though the last fight scene is impressively choreographed and, yeah, madly exciting, it can’t help but feel tacked onto things for a required martial arts extravaganza sequence.

As the subtitle may or may not imply, this Ip installment is meant to cover the latter years of the man’s life, and in typical biopic format, it does so without uncovering many warts or flaws.  I don’t know nothin’ ’bout the real Ip, and I’m sure the philosophies espoused here and Ip’s general muted demeanor (as played by Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) are accurate to a point, but the script mostly glosses over the ins and outs of Ip’s latter day training school and family sagas to continue moving the story forward.  Which is fine overall, it’s a lot of material to cover and I’d rather barrel ahead than have it over-dramatized, but the lack of thorns translates to a general ineffectiveness when it branches out to every aspect of the story.  Lain atop historical economic / political woes in 50s Hong Kong (I think, ’cause I’m shit at history, gang, and I have trouble remembering dates in films), water rations and police corruption are all covered but never feel quite real.  One of Ip’s students gets wrapped up in the latter, climbing the ranks in the force thanks to double-dealings, and he never gets his movie comeuppance… or rather, the movie makes a point of showing us his duplicity and then does nothing with it, only having it serve, loosely, as a way to get Ip involved in… FINAL FIGHT with a street gang.  The currently top rated review of the flick on IMDB (by, ahem, DICK STEEL) is correct in mentioning that this is the film’s handling of the Ip Legend – very quickly showing the various elements that have cropped up in stories and other films and then shuffling back to sorta following Ip through his final years.

But that narrative is uncomfortably fractured as well, starting from a voiceover from Ip’s son (his real son – Ip Chun – apparently involved in the film to a certain degree and making a cameo, which either gives legitimacy to the story or supports the whole “friendly” feel of things) and then suddenly shifting to the POV of a soon-to-be student who guides Ip in setting up a loose, unadvertised school of trainees, and then it’s back to the son.  Why the switch?  Good question.  We’ll call it lazy scripting.

The budget is well applied to large sets with busy backgrounds and the few moments of martial arts sprinkled through (some training sessions, a couple brawls) are, as mentioned, well shot, using minimal editing techniques to keep everyone in frame and keep their motions clear.  However, the passage of time is non-existent.  Like, I guess Ip gets a little more gray, but he could be 40 for the whole movie, and your only clue that this takes place not now is that no one has cellphones and there’s no neon on the streets.  I can’t say what I’d expect to make the era come through, but I suppose more offensive is that there’s meant to be a passage of time – watching some of Ip’s students grow and change – and there’s no indication of this except for, hey, now they have a kid, whadya know.

As part of the ‘no warts and all’ approach, every actor is given a pretty particular part to play.  I’d say Chau-Sang does a great job, but all he has to do is smile slightly here and there, calmly smoke cigarettes, and drop some Ip trading-card wisdom between scenes.  Everyone else gets to pick a card: Indignant Student, Naive Student, Tough Female, etc.  They commit these one-notes effectively.  The most varied role gets to go to Zhou Chu Chu, a ‘songstress’ who cares for Ip after his wife’s passing.  She’s seen as lower class by the Ipsters, despite their Master’s full acceptance of her, and her presence disgraceful as a replacement for Mrs. Ip.  Chu Chu portrays a lot of levels of struggle with little dialogue, but again, her storyline gets sorta muted by the whole affair.

Lastly to Yau’s direction.  Forced.  It gets flashy at odd moments with strange framing swoops for no reason other than he likes to keep the camera moving, but instead of adding momentum it prevents anything from sinking in.  This works in that middle portion, when Ip’s reputation is growing and Yau allows himself full-on martial arts flourishes during imagined sequences of Ip’s battles, but otherwise it feels very new school, and unappreciative of what a little bit of patience in a film can accomplish.

Blah?  Yeah.  And I don’t get the last minute ‘here’s Bruce Lee’ coda, except that I guess you have to mention it since he was a student of Ip.  Perhaps he appeared in the previous flick, I dunno yet.  ‘Final Fight’ is competent, and at moments quite silly fun or exciting.  It gives you enough nuggets of history to be able to participate in a conversation about Master Ip, but by the same token, it all feels a little Behind the Music, and would’ve worked better pushed either toward something more dry and historical or something more action paced, as director Yau doesn’t prove capable of finding a good balance and providing an impactful film that strikes and chips away at a surface instead of just sorta’ jogging along in comfy shoes.