Review: Ip Man 4: The Finale Takes on White Supremacy on American Soil

The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.

Ip Man 4: The Finale
Photo: Well Go USA

Wilson Yip’s Ip Man 4: The Finale picks up five years after Ip Man 3, in 1964, with the famed eponymous grandmaster (Donnie Yen) now plagued with an incurable bout of head and neck cancer and struggling to raise his teenage son, Ip Ching (Ye He), in the wake of his wife’s recent death. Ip Man soon jets off to San Francisco, hoping to secure a spot in a prestigious American school for his son, whom he wants to continue his education rather than doggedly pursue martial arts training. It’s here, in the Bay Area’s Chinatown, that Ip Man quickly finds himself entangled in the affairs of the city’s martial arts masters, all of whom are unreasonably indignant at the grandmaster’s former student, Bruce Lee (Chan Kwok-kwan), for attempting to teach kung fu to non-Chinese students.

The rising tensions between those who insist on a strict adherence to tradition and those amenable to sharing ones’ culture and customs are epitomized by the adversarial relationship that develops between Master Wan (Wu Yue), the head of the Chinese Benevolent Association, and Ip Man, who happens to need the influential Wan to write his son a recommendation letter. While tracking the intra-cultural feuding over who has the rights to teach or learn Chinese martial arts as well as the rapidly increasing international reputations of both Ip Man and Lee may seem like more than enough real estate for one film to cover, Yip makes the same mistake he made in the series’s previous entry by overstuffing Ip Man 4 with both characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with the grandmaster or his legacy.

Right after the rivalry between Wan and Ip Man is solidified, two racist American Marine instructors, Geddes (Scott Adkins) and Collin (Chris Collins), arrive on the scene, angry that one of their Chinese-American soldiers, Hartman (Vanness Wu), for having the audacity to introduce the wing chung style of kung fu into the Marine Corps’s martial arts curriculum. Geddes and Collin’s seething racism marks them as instantly deplorable, particularly after they head to the heart of Chinatown in order to embarrass the kung fu masters on their own turf, but their smug senses of entitlement and rabidly white supremacist attitudes are so cartoonishly grotesque that they never evolve into anything beyond broad avatars of evil. Their hate-spewing rhetoric is made even stranger when countered by their extreme reverence toward Japanese karate. Of course, an Ip Man film has never been able to resist taking a shot at Japan, so this peculiar character trait is actually very much on brand for the series.

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The most curious—and extraneous—of this film’s new villains comes in the form of a haughty, young cheerleader, Becky (Grace Englert), who bullies Wan’s daughter, Yonah (Vanda Margraf). As if this digression isn’t overcooked enough, Becky eventually has her even more malicious father, Andrew (Andrew Lane)—conveniently enough, the Regional Director of the INS—go after Wan and attempt to have his entire family deported. These characters, while clearly despicable, are so thinly drawn that, were it not for the different ways they oppress various Chinese people in the film, they’re virtually interchangeable in their singularity of purpose.

As with Yip’s prior films in the Ip Man series, this one’s finest moments come in the form of combat, and if the multitude of characters serves any constructive purpose, it’s a steady dose of fight scenes that show off an array of martial arts techniques, from Yen’s mastery of wing chun, Yue’s smooth deployment of tai chi, or Adkins and Collins’s ferocious, muscular styles of karate. But for all the technical skill that these scenes bring to the table, both in the martial artists’ techniques and Yuen Woo-ping’s elaborate fight choreography, they’re absent of the emotional resonance that might have tied them meaningfully to the overarching narrative.

One reason for this is that Ip Man’s relationships with both his son and Bruce Lee are consistently sidelined in favor of affording increased screen time to superfluous bad guys who do little more than redundantly reinforce the evil nature of white supremacy. It’s a noble ideology to fight against, but it leaves us wanting for a more elaborate and fulfilling interrogation of Ip Man’s own ideology, which is only touched upon in a brief and treacly coda that serves as a reminder of the grandmaster’s overwhelming kindness and lasting influence.

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Score: 
 Cast: Donnie Yen, Scott Adkins, Chan Kwok-kwan, Chris Collins, Yue Wu, Vanness Wu, Kent Cheng, Nicola Stuart-Hill, Jim Liu, Grace Englert  Director: Wilson Yip  Screenwriter: Chan Tai-lee, Leung Lai-yin, Hiroshi Fukazawa, Edmond Wong  Distributor: Well Go USA  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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