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Stay Puft
01-14-2020, 03:13 AM
IP MAN 4: THE FINALE
Dir. Wilson Yip

https://i.imgur.com/d6XYyMw.jpg

IMDb page (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076298/)

Stay Puft
01-14-2020, 03:25 AM
A shaky franchise, unsurprisingly, goes out on a low note. I might still rank Ip Man 2 at the bottom, but it's hard to say. I like the setting here (San Francisco's Chinatown, and the related cultural bureaucracy) and I think the basic idea of the narrative (Ip Man is dying, but he continues to live his life with grace, refusing to compromise his principles...and not reveal his cancer diagnosis to anybody) is a genuinely good way to close the franchise, but... that idea doesn't really get explored much at all. At this point, the series is just regurgitating dialogue and plot and themes (Ip Man 3 does a much better job dealing with similar themes, and has more memorable action scenes to boot; nothing here is as good as the elevator fight). Yuen Woo-ping's spin-off, Master Z, technically deals with Ip Man's legacy more than this film bothers to (if only because it literally puts Ip Man Legacy in the subtitle; hey, it's something!). Wilson Yip closes his film with a quick montage (by this point, it's just more regurgitation) and it's straight to the credits.

The film is much more pre-occupied operating as propaganda for Chinese interests in the current political climate. Not atypical for this franchise, whatsoever, but certainly more blatant than ever before. I found it amusing (if only as a smirking reminder of China's clumsy grabs for soft power), but another country's content garbage heap is still a content garbage heap.