Let us now praise supporting actors
Robin Laws wrote all you need to know about Ip Man 1, and in almost all regards Ip Man 2 is a carbon copy.
So why does it have any kind of suspense or drama? I can only put it down to extraordinarily good direction and fine acting from everyone except the British contingent, who range between mediocre and regrettable, and who have trouble fronting a coherent set of accents. The laurels for the movie have to go to Sammo Hung, though, who is the new element. He really, really sells his mob boss, then compromised godfather, then affronted man of honour, then concerned family man, and he does a phenomenal job of gettijng (SPOILERS) brutally beaten up in his big fight scene in order to further the plot. Which I think has to be a harder fightacting job than just doling it out.
There's some kind of gorgeous dramatic irony in having a legendary fight choreographer beaten down in a match that pits forza against frodo and has forza win, overcoming all the choreographer's fireworks, in order to serve the larger plot. It also rather neatly mirrors the theme of the movie, such as it is, because self-effacing Hung could've so clearly been the hero, except he knew he could help the film more in the role he took. Except Hung then leaves Donnie Yen with comparatively little to do, which kinda makes his stamp on the film all the more obvious.
That disparity between weaker leading man and stronger supporter is just nothing in comparison with Water for Elephants, however. Christoph Waltz owns that film, possibly even more than Johnny Depp unequivocally owns PoTC. He picks it right up and carries it through 2 hours, while his leading man flops around weakly on top, and Reese Witherspoon puts in a workmanlike performance as the only somewhat self-willed prize. Really the second best thing in the film is the elephant, and after that the nostalgic circus scenery. But none of that matters because Waltz is just the right kind of crazy and sympathetic and doomed.
Apart from enjoying watching more fight choreography and the always entertaining Louis Fan Siu-wong, there is another reason to see both Ip Man films: for the difference they show between the Japanese and the British as occupiers of the Chinese nation. Both come in some regard to test themselves, to prove their superiority, but the first film makes it obvious that the Japanese do so with a semi-defiant, semi-supplicatory attitude. China is for them a respected adversary; they come to prove their mettle. The British are equally obviously simply ignorant of what's going on with the Chinese. And I have to respect this as film storytelling, because there's a whole spectrum of colonialism going on with the Brits that IM2 does a remarkable, understated job of conveying. The comically racist English boxer is merely the most obviously obnoxious end of this spectrum, and he makes a good unpleasant villain. The range covered by the onlooking officials, though, the bias conveyed by the mid-fight outlawing of kicks, even the file of policemen who come to restore order at the end, present a much more nuanced and thoroughly damning picture of the colonial condition. In fact my favourite character here, for reasons I cannot quite explain, is the bilingual fight announcer/MC. Somehow, in his sweaty, tropical-suited demeanour, in his manner of cutting across ongoing conversations, in his emphatic ringmaster's delivery, the same in English and Chinese, he manages to convey the deeply problematic middle of British engagement with the Empire: the willful limits of understanding, the insistence on English boxing in Hong Kong, the simultaneous urges to compare worlds and to keep them separate, having ordered them by importance. And it's all the more remarkable given 1's crushing, ham-fisted nationalism.
So why does it have any kind of suspense or drama? I can only put it down to extraordinarily good direction and fine acting from everyone except the British contingent, who range between mediocre and regrettable, and who have trouble fronting a coherent set of accents. The laurels for the movie have to go to Sammo Hung, though, who is the new element. He really, really sells his mob boss, then compromised godfather, then affronted man of honour, then concerned family man, and he does a phenomenal job of gettijng (SPOILERS) brutally beaten up in his big fight scene in order to further the plot. Which I think has to be a harder fightacting job than just doling it out.
There's some kind of gorgeous dramatic irony in having a legendary fight choreographer beaten down in a match that pits forza against frodo and has forza win, overcoming all the choreographer's fireworks, in order to serve the larger plot. It also rather neatly mirrors the theme of the movie, such as it is, because self-effacing Hung could've so clearly been the hero, except he knew he could help the film more in the role he took. Except Hung then leaves Donnie Yen with comparatively little to do, which kinda makes his stamp on the film all the more obvious.
That disparity between weaker leading man and stronger supporter is just nothing in comparison with Water for Elephants, however. Christoph Waltz owns that film, possibly even more than Johnny Depp unequivocally owns PoTC. He picks it right up and carries it through 2 hours, while his leading man flops around weakly on top, and Reese Witherspoon puts in a workmanlike performance as the only somewhat self-willed prize. Really the second best thing in the film is the elephant, and after that the nostalgic circus scenery. But none of that matters because Waltz is just the right kind of crazy and sympathetic and doomed.
Apart from enjoying watching more fight choreography and the always entertaining Louis Fan Siu-wong, there is another reason to see both Ip Man films: for the difference they show between the Japanese and the British as occupiers of the Chinese nation. Both come in some regard to test themselves, to prove their superiority, but the first film makes it obvious that the Japanese do so with a semi-defiant, semi-supplicatory attitude. China is for them a respected adversary; they come to prove their mettle. The British are equally obviously simply ignorant of what's going on with the Chinese. And I have to respect this as film storytelling, because there's a whole spectrum of colonialism going on with the Brits that IM2 does a remarkable, understated job of conveying. The comically racist English boxer is merely the most obviously obnoxious end of this spectrum, and he makes a good unpleasant villain. The range covered by the onlooking officials, though, the bias conveyed by the mid-fight outlawing of kicks, even the file of policemen who come to restore order at the end, present a much more nuanced and thoroughly damning picture of the colonial condition. In fact my favourite character here, for reasons I cannot quite explain, is the bilingual fight announcer/MC. Somehow, in his sweaty, tropical-suited demeanour, in his manner of cutting across ongoing conversations, in his emphatic ringmaster's delivery, the same in English and Chinese, he manages to convey the deeply problematic middle of British engagement with the Empire: the willful limits of understanding, the insistence on English boxing in Hong Kong, the simultaneous urges to compare worlds and to keep them separate, having ordered them by importance. And it's all the more remarkable given 1's crushing, ham-fisted nationalism.