Like Yen, Zhang Jin actually is an accomplished martial artist and as such genre aficionados should enjoy seeing the two duke it out. It is a massive missed opportunity not to have the actual Ip Chun interact with the child version of him in the film in a cameo. The real-life Ip Chun, now 91, served as the martial arts consultant on this film, as with the two earlier instalments. Ip Man also had two sons in real life, but only one shows up.
Any and all scenes involving Ip Man’s wife Cheung Wing-sing and his son Ip Chun are treacly and cloying. Ip Man is a combination warrior-sage-saint with no shortcomings to speak of and therefore not terribly interesting, because the filmmakers are too preoccupied with respecting his status to take any risks with the characterisation. Yen has considerable experience playing Ip Man and his is often considered the definitive portrayal of the master. Po says the line “the two foreign devils are in cahoots!” with nary a sense of irony. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Ip Man film without a serving of anti-Western sentiment, with a supercilious British police captain also showing up. Tyson is no actor and looks extremely out of place in Ip Man 3, unable to beat the snatches of Cantonese dialogue he is given into submission. Ip Man doesn’t even meet Frank until more than an hour into the film. Ivan Drago in Rocky IV will come away sorely disappointed. Those looking forward to a showdown along the lines of Rocky vs. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Tyson is in very little of the film and his is a C-plot. While it was originally suggested that director Yip’s objective was for Ip Man 3 to follow the master-disciple relationship between Ip Man and Lee, that’s more a B-plot than anything else. Chan bears an uncanny resemblance to Lee and this reviewer is relieved that this is what we got instead of a disconcerting floating CGI head.
Chan previously played Lee in the 2008 biographical TV series The Legend of Bruce Lee. Chan’s movements are appropriately swift, though his attempt at Lee’s signature cocky grin borders on caricature. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and Lee is played instead by Danny Chan, who does a fun, if over-the-top impression of the pioneering action star.
The initial announcements that Mike Tyson had signed on to play the villain and that Bruce Lee would be resurrected via digital trickery both reeked of unabashed gimmickry. Sure, the action choreography by Yen, Yuen Shun-Yee and Yuen Woo-Ping is expectedly splendid, but it ultimately needs to be in service of a solid story, which just isn’t the case here. The screenplay by Edmond Wong, Lai-yin Leung and Chan Tai-Li comes across as incredibly choppy and lacking in focus. This is a mess, with the feeling that a great deal was changed from what director Wilson Yip intended to shoot. Somehow, Ip Man 3 happened anyway, with Yen saying this will close out the series for good. The sheer number of Ip Man-centric projects that cropped up after the success of the first film were also a factor in turning Yen off returning. Yen was initially reluctant to portray Ip Man a third time, saying of the second film “I believe it’s best to end something when it’s at perfection, and leave behind a good memory.” “Perfection” is a very strong word, Donnie. As Ip Man’s disciples protect the innocent town folk, he must take on Frank and Cheung Tin-chi to prove his supremacy and safeguard his loved ones. Local gangster Ma King-sang, working for Frank, terrorises the town, threatening the school that Ip Chun and Cheung Fong attend. Said matches are organised by American property developer Frank (Tyson), a crooked businessman who has the British Hong Kong police captain in his pocket. It turns out that Cheung Fong is the son of rickshaw puller Cheung Tin-chi (Zhang), also a Wing Chun practitioner who is making money on the side in illegal fighting matches. Ip Chun, the son of Ip Man and his wife Cheung Wing-sing (Hung), gets into a schoolyard fight with Cheung Fong. It is 1950 and things are going well for Ip Man, who is respected throughout the land, continuing to run his Wing Chun academy. After a five year leave of absence from the role, Donnie Yen is back as legendary martial artist Ip Man.