Ip Man 2 Legend of the GrandMaster

MOVIE REVIEW | 'IP MAN 2: LEGEND(传说，图例) OF THE GRANDMASTER（大师领导人）'

Darren Shahlavi, left, and Donnie Yen face off in an East versus（与...相对） West match in “Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster.”

This Martial Artist’s Fists Never Leave His Body The dynamo（发电机，精力充沛的人） at the center of “Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster” doesn’t leap over buildings in a single bound, but he comes

entertainingly close to superhero status.

Based on the life of ’s martial arts teacher, Ip Man — played with a quick smile and flying fists by — this sequel（结局续集） to picks up after the title character has fled his mainland Chinese home for Hong Kong (a flight repeated in helpful flashback（急转）). There, with his wife and son, Ip Man sets up his humble home and labors to open a martial arts academy, a place where true believers can perfect the ancient physical art of Wing Chun.

Though a boy named Bruce stops by briefly, no women enter the school, a shame given that this style of kung fu has been traced through the centuries to when a young female tofu seller, Wing Chun, learned how to fight from a Buddhist nun, Ng Mui, and then passed her knowledge on. (The legend has been and is playfully riffed on in the 1994 movie featuring Michelle Yeoh and a high-flying tray of trembling .) Generations later Ip Man, now the keeper of the Wing Chun flame, seeks to popularize the system. First, though, he has to

match wits and blows with a shady consortium of Hong Kong martial arts schools and the corrupt British government representatives cracking the state whip. There’s a touch more to this story, including pinched pennies and a new

pregnancy, as Ip Man opens his school and attracts his first recruits, most of whom are as poor as he is. While his wife frets about the bills, he worries about the future from his rooftop academy where the swooping cameras, drying laundry and human bodies are in constant whirl. Like the rivalry among the schools, the family’s struggles turn out to be just one part of a larger story of imperialism run amok on Chinese land. It’s only a matter of time before the rivals become as one against the British, though happily the nationalist fist-pumping sometimes found in mainstream Chinese productions comes with a whole lot of fancy fist- and footwork.

With the exception of an overextended, two-part smack down featuring a brutish British boxer (Darren Shahlavi), the director Wilson Yip keeps the movie moving as fast as the whiplash action. Choreographed by the film martial-arts veteran

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