I feel like if Bruce Lee had watched this, he would’ve loved it, and that’s about the best you can say about a kung fu movie.
In reality, Ip Man never fought the Japanese in anything like the way depicted here, but what the film offers is a beat-by-beat traditional martial arts plot that takes inspiration from the classics and becomes one in itself. It depicts a fictionalized version of his time in Foshan, tracing his fall from wealth, his struggle during the war and his refusal to ever give in to the enemy. While it’s made with both respect and the full participation of Ip’s descendants (Ip Chun was the primary Wing Chun consultant on it), this is hardly a straight biopic but it’s still probably the Ip Man film that’s closest to the truth.
Reliable action vet Wilson Yip was put in the director’s chair and his regular leading man Donnie Yen won the title role… Ip Man (2008) Since the 1990s, a full-blown Ip Man biopic had been in discussion (initially with Corey Yuen attached) but one didn’t go into production until 2008, when Raymond Wong’s Mandarin Films announced theirs. While Ip Man struggled with money and ill health (and a reliance on opium) in his later years, he lived to the age of 79 and his legacy continues today in his writings on Wing Chun and in the form of his son Ip Chun, who inherited the style. It wasn’t a popular style at the time but by the time Bruce Lee – who learned it from Ip Man – put the spotlight on it in the ’60s, the rest was history. This newly formed Wing Chun school kept growing in line with Ip’s reputation as a martial artist.
Read more: The Real Life Stories Behind Martial Arts Movie Legends Cheung laid down a challenge and was unceremoniously beaten in minutes, surrendering himself and his class to Ip Man. He took him in and was shocked when, during a martial arts class Cheung was teaching, this frail and homeless old man started criticizing his technique. By chance in 1952, a martial artist called Leung Cheung found Ip Man wandering around Macao and took pity on him, having no idea who he was. He was 51 and penniless when he arrived in Hong Kong, separated from his family and destitute. Beyond being Bruce Lee’s beloved “sifu,” Ip Man was a key figure in 20th-century martial arts, credited with perpetuating the popularity of Wing Chun as a style, and his life feels more obviously cinematic than most, peppered as it is with triumph and agony… We see representations of Ip Man in a couple of older Bruceploitation movies like Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (1976) and later in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) but – astonishingly – it took until 2008 to get a full-length feature about his life. Perhaps because these films were mostly sold to the west, one part of Bruce’s life that was rarely explored was his early life in Hong Kong and his Wing Chun training with Ip Man. Lookalikes with new names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, and Bruce Leung became some of the most prolific kung fu stars of the era, and “Bruceploitation” became a prominent subgenre. With the kung fu craze booming, almost every facet of Bruce’s life – and plenty of glorious nonsense like a fight against Dracula – got turned into a movie. After Bruce Lee’s death at the height of his fame in 1973, Hong Kong filmmakers raced to capitalize on his stardom. Here's every Ip Man movie, ranked worst to best. Yen went on to reprise the role in several sequels in the decade that followed, but he wasn't the only actor playing the kung fu veteran - numerous other Ip Man movies were released in that time, and while some have been pure cash-grabs, others are essential viewing for martial arts movie fans. When Donnie Yen's Ip Man became a hit at home and abroad, it kick-started what fans of that film refer to as the "Ipsploitation" era. When Bruce Lee passed, what's become known as the "Bruceploitation" period of Hong Kong cinema began, with filmmakers casting lookalikes in crude movies like (no joke) Enter Another Dragon. His legacy would remain largely unknown in the wider world until 2008, when Donnie Yen portrayed him for the first time. Ip would pass on his expert knowledge to Lee and numerous others before succumbing to cancer at the age of 79. After spending his childhood between his home in Foshan and the island of Hong Kong (he left the mainland for good when the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949), he opened a kung fu school, the first of its kind. Ip began his training in the Wing Chun style of kung fu at the age of 12.
In the West, he's known as the guy who taught Bruce Lee how to fight, but in his native China, kung fu grandmaster Ip Man is an icon in his own right.