Ip Man 4: The Finale movie review (2019)
Having already traded blows in show stopping duels with Sammo Hung, Mike Tyson, Darren and Shahlavi among others, Donnie Yen shares lovingly orchestrated fight scenes with martial artist Chris Collins, Wu and finally Adkins in “The Finale.” There’s also room for Chan’s Bruce Lee to show off in a back alley brawl with some racist Karate experts. Chan’s Lee impression is truly wonderful, perfectly capturing his swagger and his signature body language. He’s almost charismatic enough to steal a little of Yen’s thunder. Yen, the Fred Astaire of kung fu, is finally beginning to look somewhat his age, which adds poignancy to his performance and adds no little extra tension to his fight scenes; can he still defeat his opponents as handily as he used to? His scene with Adkins, especially, is a nail-biter. Adkins isn’t usually framed by other directors to emphasize his relative enormity as so much of his screen persona revolves around him being underestimated by his opponents. Here he’s a tank, swift and sledgehammer-hard, and you genuinely worry about Yen’s body standing up to Adkins’ legwork and formidable fists. It’s one of the few times in the four “Ip Man” movies that it feels like the filmmakers aren’t stacking the decks in their hero’s favor.
To go with the film’s musical dramatic structure, Yip and Johnny To’s regular cinematographer Siu-Keung Cheng create a world alive with brilliant color and ornate design. This feels at times like a Stanley Donen or Li Han-hsiang movie, with precise framing of weightless bodies in wonderfully lit presentational spaces. Yip’s maturation from his early Category 3 days to one of the most dependable directors of martial arts has been most rewarding because he’s realized that being a more serious director doesn’t mean losing vibrancy. The first two “Ip Man” movies had sombre, reserved color palettes, grey and brown to match the depressive mood of pre-and-post-war China. In “The Finale” Yen’s signature black clothing can’t help but stand out against the neon set design. Yip seems like he’s having as much fun with every single production element here, as opposed to just saving his energy for the death-defying combat sequences. Kenji Kawai's music is still too emphatic for its own good, but when the dancing’s this good, the tune hardly matters.
The “Ip Man” movies have always been nationalistic triumphs, with Yen as the savior of the downtrodden, protecting China from the tyrannical Japanese in the first film, and then from Americans, and from the avaricious character they brought to China in the latest two. “Finale” leans hard into the series’ anti-racist message, turning Adkins sadistic sergeant into a mouthpiece for Trump-era bigotry (Adkins is the best actor among the villains; the sadistic cheerleader and her family seem to be reading their lines phonetically). Slowly the enmity the other masters feel toward Ip Man dissolves because there’s greater threat to their way of life than Lee. It’s a clumsily delivered but deeply felt message of cooperation in trying times and surely there’s no bad time for such a thing. Through four movies now Yen’s beatific kung fu master has taken punches for every kind of person, helping others by staying his best self in a violent world and only resorting to violence when it’s absolutely necessary. Yen’s Ip Man will be sorely missed if this is indeed his last match, but at least he walked into the sunset on an exuberant and heartfelt note.
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