Review: Ip Man 4: The Finale (2019)

The Ip Man series has always been mostly soggy drama and blatant propaganda filling the time between seriously impressive fight sequences—an acceptable ratio so long as the fights remained great. However, Ip Man 4: The Finale, the presumably last film in the series starring Donnie Yen as the venerable Wing Chun master, takes the cheese factor to another level. The film follows Ip Man in his twilight years heading to San Francisco to check in on his most famous student, Bruce Lee (Danny Chan Kwok-Kwan), and find a school for his son, Ip Ching (Jim Liu). While there, he finds himself a reluctant defender of his culture when a psychotic marine sergeant (Scott Adkins) makes it his personal mission to prove the supremacy of American culture and karate over Chinese culture and martial arts.

While Ip Man is the heart and soul of this series, he’s relegated to the margins for most of this final chapter in favour of two new characters. One is Yonah (Vanda Margraf), a plucky Chinese-American girl who wants to pursue her love of cheerleading despite the demands of her father, Wan (Wu Yue), who happens to chair the Chinese Benevolent Association of San Francisco. The other is Hartman Wu (Vanness Wu), a student of Bruce Lee and defiant Chinese-American staff sergeant who wants to prove that Chinese martial arts have a place in the US army. 

Yonah and Hartman represent the next generation of Chinese heroes and thus are figures who’ll carry on the legacy of Ip Man after he’s gone. As with the previous films, the central conflict comes in the form of cartoonishly racist villains who want to prove their supremacy over the Chinese. In the first film, it was Japanese colonizers, and in the second, a British boxer. The third film mostly focuses on Ip Man’s conflict with a rival Wing Chun master—which is part of the reason it’s my favourite in the series—but this film returns to the theme of racial oppression, with white bullies at Yonah’s school and Scott Adkins’ insane marine sergeant, Barton Geddes.

I admire the general construction of a series that seeks to inspire ethnic Chinese viewers by showing heroes standing up to racial oppression—it’s a mainstay approach in the kung fu genre. Furthermore, it’s a satisfying reversal of fortune to watch a Chinese blockbuster treat American characters with the same contempt that Americans usually hold for foreigners in Hollywood blockbusters. But just because you can understand the motivation for such an approach doesn’t mean the film executes this dynamic all that well.

The racist oppression in Ip Man 4: The Finale reaches such cartoonish levels that it’s hard to take seriously. In one scene, a pack of Yonah’s fellow students, all white, descend on her to pester her and mock her Chinese heritage. It’s not so much the bullying that is silly, but what follows, where Yonah retorts that her fellow students are not real Americans, but simply stole the land from the Native Americans—the phrasing and emphasis of which sounds nearly identical to modern Chinese Communist Party propaganda critiquing American imperialism. The white students react by attacking Yonah 10-on-one, threatening to do her serious harm until Ip Man steps in to defend her.

As for Hartman, his entire portion of the plot makes almost no sense. For some reason, his gunnery sergeant, Barton Geddes (Scott Adkins), is obsessed with karate and forces his unit to train at karate all day in a massive hangar on the army base. Hartman thinks that they should incorporate some Wing Chun into their daily regiment, but Barton refuses, thinking that Chinese martial arts are weak and undermine American supremacy…even though he practices karate, which is Japanese, not American. You see why this part of the plot rings false when it accomplishes nothing other than to blend together China’s great oppressors of past and present, Japan and America, and highlight their alliance in the postwar era. There’s also the matter of the film never questioning why an army unit would do nothing but train at martial arts, as well as the strange assumption that karate somehow upholds American supremacy on the field of battle.

When Hartman presses the matter and goes over Barton’s head, Barton makes it his personal mission to defeat all the Chinese martial arts masters in San Francisco. It’s no secret that Scott Adkins is a terrific stuntman, and a B-movie action star in his own right in direct-to-video films like Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012). But he’s a dreadful actor, here doing his best R. Lee Ermey impersonation as he berates his fellow soldiers and drones on about the greatness of karate, while also beating the snot out of any rivals, save Ip Man, who rises to the occasion to save his countrymen’s honour.

The saving grace is that all this silly plotting leads to some terrific fight sequences. An early standout has Bruce Lee handily dispatch a rival in an alleyway. Danny Chan Kwok-Kwan does an admirable impersonation during the fight, yipping and bouncing around and using nunchucks like the real Bruce Lee did. The grandmaster of fight choreography, Yuen Woo-ping, supplies the film’s action choreography. It’s refreshing to watch him construct fights without wirework, where bones crunch and the performers move at stunning speeds without the aid of special effects.

The other memorable fight is the finale when Ip Man takes on Barton. The duel, which takes place in the army hangar, is surprisingly vicious, with the aging Ip Man having to counter Barton’s speed and strength with stillness and finesse, essentially overcoming yang with yin. By this point, Adkins has become little more than a howling cartoon, and so it’s especially satisfying to see Ip Man calmly dismantle him during the fight, paying back his racist hatred with stolid resistance.

Both of these key sequences highlight the exceptional cinematography by Cheng Siu-Keung, who often works with the Hong Kong action-master Johnnie To. Cheng’s camera emphasizes the clean lines of action, both within the fights and within the geographic spaces of the scenes. He also manages to add a lot of colour and grain to the digital images, which gives the digital visuals texture (when they can often look flat) and helps ground the film in the historical setting.

As a work of filmmaking, Ip Man 4: The Finale is as impressive as the other films in the series. It has exciting duels between master stunt performers and keeps the story moving from action scene to action scene. As well, any quiet moment with Donnie Yen is a balm. The ultimate problem is that there’s too little of Donnie Yen, who was hesitant to return to the series for a fourth time. Ip Man 4: The Finale sidelines Yen’s natural charisma in favour of exaggerating the already cartoonish elements of the previous films. The result is another example of impressive stunt work and action choreography, but one that’s sadly little more than propaganda in its tale of Chinese perseverance.

5 out of 10

Ip Man 4: The Finale (2019, Hong Kong/China)

Directed by Wilson Yip; written by Edmond Wong, Dana Fukazawa, Chan Tai Lee, Jil Leung Lai Yin; starring Donnie Yen, Wu Yue, Vanness Wu, Scott Adkins, Kent Cheng, Danny Chan Kwok-Kwan, Ngo Ka-nin, Jim Liu.

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