Here's a long over-due prequel to the popular IP Man series, but this time played by a different actor. Here IP Man with a friend of his who works carrying Rickshaw's, but they soon get mixed up in some dangerous situations including having to fight to prove Wing-Chun's supremacy. Now this unfortunately isn't a very engaging storyline, in fact as action movies go, this was quite dull, however lets not forget this is a martial arts movie so the main draw is the martial arts, not the plot.
So as for the fight scenes, well there's good and bad. I saw a review on here claiming the fights are slow. Well i completely disagree with that. Not one time did it feel slow to me. The problems i had with the fights is you could often see that they weren't hitting each other. This is a big Direction problem that happened all too often, but an even bigger problem with this movie, that occurred in it's entirety, was the sloppy chop-cuts and close- up cameras, that looked like many of the cast were lousy at Martial Arts, which is why they had to just show a foot hitting a person, or a fist pointing at someone. It made for some very hard to follow and unoriginal fights. There was some good bits though, like when a man gets thrown through a window.
Now to the first of 2 of the most common complaints people had on here. First, that the lead, Tsi Mui, (who weirdly isn't listed in the cast on here for some reason), is bad compared to Donnie Yen. Well, that may be the case, but so is gammon compared to Steak Diane, but it's still good. What i mean by that is Mui does a good enough job. He still has some of Yen's mannerisms and that famous rapid multi-punch thing. It's just the charisma that Yen had that Mui lacks, but of you look beyond that, you will see he does look similar and has the same ideals too.
The other most common complaint on here is the acting is terrible. Well, again wrong. The acting is, while not Oscar worthy, not terrible either as a whole. The bad acting is just the English Actors, who i will agree act as if they are taken from a cartoon. I did expect Tom and Jerry to come round the corner at times, but for me, the rest were reasonable.
So to conclude, this is no way near the train crash people are making it out to be. I can only assume, given that (at time of writing) only 579 people have rated this, that most of these reviews are either people that are Yen fan boys, that would criticise anyone else, or people that simply don't watch many Martial Arts movies, because as someone who has watched hundreds, i can tell you this is nowhere near the worst and certainly better than the Final Fight of 2013.
