Ip Man: The Awakening

source: Yip Man: Zong shi jue xing

Looks like the IP MAN character is still capable of bringing in a few pennies, hence we have THE AWAKENING, a prequel film made on the Chinese mainland. There are no familiar cast members in this one and the story, in which the future hero tackles some local street thugs and gangsters, is absolutely negligible. What this does have going for it are some fairly commendable production values which at least get the scenery semi-convincing for the era, and a great deal of fight scenes which I found more than adequate considering the low budget nature of the production. Not the kind of film to set the world on fire, but it'll do...

Trailer—Yip Man: Zong shi jue xing

source: Ip Man: The Awakening

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.

The slow motion it's very low quality which ruin any scene that use it in the Movie, but luckily they did'nt use it a lot. The Main character is good, and hes development not that bad. The Side characters, they simple return from death in final scene, which is very weird. And the acting and some dialog its so cringe. The Villain don't have any interesting character. Overall, its amuse me, and good to watch.

Ip Man is a historic Chinese martial arts master who inspired a nation in his era, and a raft of movies ever since. Most memorable for Western viewers would be the four films starring Donnie Yen from 2008-19. Besides being an accomplished fighter and actor, he achieved the rare feat of making all four excellent, without the usual sequel dropoff. Well, to be honest, #3 had a bit of a quality dip, before rallying for #4, which was arguably the best of the quartet. Even though the last of these was titled Ip Man: The Finale, that qualifier apparently only applied to Yen, not his character. The Marvel Universe isn't the only place one can blow right past what sounds like a series-ending name. Did anyone really think Avengers: Endgame would be the end of a franchise? In this extension, a younger version of Yen (nice-guy good looks, projecting integrity and humility beyond his years), Miu Tse seems a worthy successor in both requirements for the character. Reworking a premise that's been oft-used since the Hong Kong chopsocky factories of the 1970s-80, Ip Man plays a superb fighter, going to the big city for the first time, with no idea how much corruption he'd be facing. In this case, it seems to be set the 1930s, with some of the British occupiers rounding up young women for human trafficking on a major scale. They're supported by cops on the take, and even natives more interested in a paycheck than in their fellow citizens. Ip Man is compelled to give all the baddies a beat down, despite losses and setbacks along the way, for the sake of the women and for Chinese pride against the invaders. The script follows formula, honoring the hero and tradition. Miu Tse should be a rising star with a bright future. One interesting novelty is the villains' use of a uniquely British, largely forgotten, martial arts form called bartitsu, which combines elements of many disciplines from Western boxing to several Asian specialties, usually wielding a cane or other stick. It's rarely been part of any films in the genre. Sherlock Holmes mentioned it in passing once. Colin Firth's character in Kingsman: The Secret Service deployed a variation, though not calling it by name. Portraying the epitome of the dignified gentry, his stick was, of course, an umbrella. The film is very efficient, running only 80 minutes. If you find the early fight scenes hard to follow (camera too close, edits too choppy), don't lose faith. The later ones deliver the action with all the visual and audio quality fans will expect. It's almost as if the crew learned their craft on-the-job, ending with far more polish than they started. Overall, a worthy debut in a classic role. Though not rated at the time of this review, I'd describe the violence level as a strong PG-13, just on the restrained side of an R.

Those responsible for this ignoble movie should at least be fined for defaming the Yip Man legend. They did not even try to tell something new and even less original: they just patched up a few episodes from the previous fine films with some unbelievable ludicrous evil characters with the gullible heroes they were just dumb enough to conceive.

It's a sweet, small film about hong kong and china.. it's not brilliant, it's not boring and it lacks a really good plot. Still the fights are wing chun and the acting is not bad. If you like the genre you will probably have fun.. no idea why people wrote the other reviews.. i enjoyed it.

I will not recommend pay to watch because its really wasting money. The story is just below average same as other versus gangster stories. The story nothing to phrase on and very predictable from start to end. A lot of the storyline are very illogical and total nonsense. The acting are poor and worse the main Ip Man cast a young man still in college but the actor is so old with wrinkles! The make-up is so poorly invested and everything is so budgeted. The directorship is poor, stunt is poor, story is below average, acting poor, effects poor, stunts poor, nothing is good! I cannot give more than 4/10 because this is one of the worse martial arts movie I had watched in 2021 and 2022! It really brought down the Ip Man series of movies. The quality is like year pre 1997 when HK movie industry trying to make more money (before HK handover) by quantity and neglect quality.