My Review of "Ip Man 3"

Ip Man 3 is a movie that came out back in 2015. It's weird that I haven't seen it until 2020 because I remember loving the previous movies. I did however feel that it was a cash grab because the trailers featured Mike Tyson as Ip Man's main foe. So I didn't bother with this movie however I did see some clips of the fight scenes on YouTube and it did look pretty cool. Now that Ip Man 4 has come out I decided I might as well check it out so that I can watch the latest version afterwards.

This movie starts out not too long after the second movie. Ip Man's son is going to a new school and I guess everyone's kind of adjusting to the new life there in Hong Kong. Of course this movie wouldn't be a martial arts movie if it doesn't have conflict and it comes about really quickly.

Right away we're aware that there are gangsters that want to take over the property where Ip Man's son's school is. Of course they want to take over a public school, that's totally realistic. So they make multiple threats and I guess they think that Ip Man would be better off policing the school than the actual police. I'm already feeling stretched in how cartoonish this movie feels. I mean Hong Kong is one of the most populated cities in the world and yet this movie makes it feel like it's a small village where everyone knows each other.

There's also another Wing Chun martial artist that has a child at this school and he's trying to build a Wing Chun school himself. There's going to be a ton of problems with that as schools are expensive and he works as a rickshaw driver. At night he's doing underground fights to raise funds for this school and he's really good.

That's a whole different story-line that could have been a whole movie all by itself because he has to get out of the shadow of Ip Man as Ip Man is the king of Wing Chun. This movie in fact kind of blends two separate movies all in one movie. At one time it kind of feels like a movie had ended and the sequel is starting.

As mentioned in the beginning there's a story-line that involves Mike Tyson as the main antagonist. He's the main villain that's looking to take over the children's school. They really egg on how bad he is by having his henchmen burn and board up the children's school. They even go so far as to kidnap some of the children from the school. Again this movie is very cartoonish. Even the heroes and villains are to the far extreme.

To make the movie even more complicated, Ip Man's wife has terminal cancer and we see she's trying to get him to spend more time with the family because their time is limited. Ip Man finds this out and realizes that he's taken her for granted. This whole story could have been a movie itself as well. In fact I think they sort of did this story-line in Jet Li's movie called Fearless.

They tried to pack too much into this movie and even though it is coherent, story-wise it doesn't quite mix well. It's all over the place and I think they had their best intentions when they were doing this.

There are even parts of the movie that can get quite grating. There is a scene where the children are kidnapped and the kids would not stop crying and I would relate the sounds of their crying to nails on a chalkboard. At one point I thought why not let them get kidnapped because it was so annoying.

Still with all of these gripes this isn't why you're here to watch Ip Man 3. Well the previous Ip Man movies were more acceptable stories. People came to watch the fighting and they do not disappoint. They have a lot of interesting camera angles and I can tell that they added computer effects to dazzle the audience even more. Even the cash grab of an opponent with Mike Tyson was pretty well done.

I don't care what character you have Mike Tyson play he's Mike Tyson. You just can't believe him as anyone else but him because he's such a distinguished person.

Overall, I was still able to enjoy this movie because of the fight scenes. The story not so much but that's not why I came to watch this movie and I'm sure that's the same story for a lot of people. You could literally watch this movie and skip all the narrative and still enjoy this movie by just watching the fight sequences. I have to give this movie a 6 out of 10. It is nothing but an action movie. For some that's enough but for me it isn't.