terrible film
It was the same, old "fuck gweilo" martial arts movie we've seen a thousand times by now, except even more patriotic and ridiculous than normal. Aside from Hartman's Commanding Officer, the movie pretty much portrays every white person as a cartoon stereotype. None of them are portrayed with any semblance of depth, they are all just one-note bad guys created solely for Ip Man to beat up.
Aside from its racist portrayal of whites, the film's plot is utterly ridiculous as well. A good chunk of the movie's central conflict starts just because of a fight that occurs in high school, which then leads to the racist white girl who started it all to literally ask her father (an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer) to DEPORT ALL THE CHINESE IN SAN FRANCISCO, CHINATOWN. Who the fuck wrote this?! Oh, and in case you couldn't figure out which characters in the movie were racist, the film literally spell it outs for you that Scott Adkin's character is a bigot with him outright admitting at one point that he is prejudiced towards blacks and Chinese. Again, who the fuck wrote this?!
On top of its racist overtones and painfully contrived story conflict, the rest of the film just employs cheap, manipulative, ham-fisted drama about Ip Man having cancer and not getting along with his son. I know Ip Man in real-life died like that, but the whole thing about him and his son getting into quarrels as he gets older is just tired, cliched melodrama at this point. Unlike Ip Man 3, which had some actual poignancy in regards to the cancer sub-plot with his wife (as it was backed up by subtext throughout about how fighting and competition is worthless), here, it just comes off as a cheap attempt in tricking the audience into thinking the movie has a heart. It really doesn't.
It was such a disappointing note for the series to end on. Out of all four films, I can honestly say this one was by far the worst.
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