Return of Ip Man
The end of the first film saw Ip defending Chinese honor by defeating a highly skilled Japanese officer in an epic fight. The sequel picks up several years later in Hong Kong in 1950. The economy is in shambles and Ip, his pregnant wife, and their young son are just barely making ends meet. Ip opens a Wing Chun school and slowly students begin to trickle in, each in awe of Ip’s skill and demeanor. But, trouble soon arises when one of Ip’s headstrong students gets into a fight with a neighboring school. Sammo Hung is Master Hung, leader of the rival school and of the martial arts community in general. He and Ip butt heads several times but eventually a friendship develops and the two will face the primary antagonist in this movie, a British boxer known as Twister.
Not unlike Jet Li’s Fearless, the last half hour of Ip Man 2 focuses heavily on this final showdown between East and West, Twister Vs Master Hung and Ip Man. Even though it’s familiar territory, it’s really good familiar territory. I had not felt this attached to a character in a movie in a very long time and honestly I didn’t know how the final showdown would turn out. I felt nervous and worried when Ip was taking hits and I so wanted him to beat the snot out of the villain. For a movie to really rope me in like that and keep me so captivated for its entire duration is, for me, the sign of something special.
The fight choreography, which Sammo Hung directed, is outstanding again. I wasn’t a huge fan of some of the events in the fish market fight scene, it felt a bit too unrealistic, but certainly the choreography for the vast majority of the film is mesmerizing. As for the script, I thought there were some scenes or parts of the story that were rushed, but overall it’s great.
On Blu-ray
The two disc Collector’s Edition comes packaged in a standard size Blu-ray case with a removable cover. The cover art matches that of the art for the case. The first disc contains the feature while the second disc, a DVD, contains more extra features. The image quality is gorgeous. Scenes are rich with color and detail, both a credit to the art direction and to the quality of the original recording. Audio includes full DTS-HD 5.1 tracks in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, as well as Stereo versions of each, and subtitles in English. The title them from the original movie, a really wonderful and memorable tune, is back as well.
As for extra features, there are several and they are good extra features, not just filler, although there is a bit of overlap of some segments. Here’s what you get on Disc 1:
-Making Of (18m, SD) – An interesting making of feature that has lots of production and behind the scenes footage as well as cast and crew interviews.
-Trailers – The Teaser and Theatrical trailer are include in HD, and also the International trailer in SD.
And Disc 2 contains:
-Behind the Sets – Behind the scenes and production footage of four key locations in the movie: The Community, Fish market, Chinese restaurant, and the Big/Small Arena.
-Shooting Diary (3m) – An un-narrated montage of various scenes of production, set to music.
-Deleted Scenes (9m) – Four deleted scenes.
-Interviews (Twelve Interviews, Various Times) – Twelve interviews including the Director and a bunch of the cast. Some interviews are just three or four minutes, others are thirteen and fifteen minutes. Like the first Ip Man, the questions and answers are pretty interesting.
The DVD set has the exact same extra features. Its presentation quality is understandable less than that of the Blu-ray release, but it’s still quite impressive.
To the summary…