When I first saw posters for the movie Ip Man, I thought, “How strange, a Hong Kong movie about Internet Protocol? Intellectual Property?” But no, Ip Man is an alternate spelling of the name of martial arts master Yip Man, who today is remembered as being one of Bruce Lee’s teachers.

Spoilers ahead.

If you’re going to make a biographical film, a movie about someone who really existed, someone who lived in relatively recent times (he died in 1972), one would think the script writers might try to fit in details of the guy’s actual life, but most of the movie is made up. For example, Ip Man did not flee to Hong Kong in the early 1940s after being shot by the Japanese; he was a member of the KMT in China and left in 1948 as Mao was coming to power. Ip wasn’t just sitting around in his house every day sipping tea and accepting duels from wanna-bes, he was a cop in Fo Shan, but they make no mention of that. Actually, according to Wikipedia, he wasn’t in Fo Shan, where the entire film takes place, during the Japanese occupation. And yet, Ip’s oldest son is one of the consultants credited on the film.

And apparently they are still making films where an unarmed man can go up against 10 guys wielding axes and the only injuries he gets are bruised knuckles. Why doesn’t one of the 10 just throw the fucking axe?

This is a movie carefully designed to fan the flames of Chinese hatred against the Japanese for their actions during WWII. To the point where the end titles make it seem that the Japanese surrendered to the Chinese on August 14, 1945.

Now I’m obviously not Chinese and I would assume that if I were to make claims that the depiction of the Japanese in this film is entirely one-sided and that they couldn’t have been as bad as all that would be as offensive to Chinese as if someone told me the same thing about Nazis. (So why is it that in 2008 there were two films made about “good Nazis” – Valkyrie and The Reader?) I know, via Facebook, that many HK people went to see this movie and left feeling “proud to be Chinese.” I suppose one could say the film is even-handed because it does depict Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese and gangs of Chinese bandits who are preying on Chinese during the war.

Yet showing the truth would be problematic. It was mainly the KMT that resisted the Japanese during WWII; they’re the ones who fought 22 major battles against the Japanese, they’re the ones who lost millions while the Communist army watched from the sidelines, building up its strength for the civil war that they knew would continue once the Japanese were tossed out. But you can’t depict that in a film and then have a prayer of it screening in modern China. So you can’t mention that Ip was a member of the KMT. Once you throw away that historical fact, you might as well make up the rest too.

The other thing is, knowing the ending – knowing that he’s going to survive the war and move to HK and set up a school, robs the film of much of the tension the director tries to set up towards the end. Will the Japanese general kill him in the duel? Obviously not. When he gets shot and lies on the ground motionless in a pool of blood, is he dead or dying? Not so much.

So aside from my complaints about historical accuracy and fights in which an unarmed man goes up alone against 10 or more at a time and no one lays a finger on him, it’s a relatively entertaining fictional film. I’ve always liked Donnie Yen and Simon Yam is used to good effect here. Anyway, I think this whole thing was done better in Fists of Fury and Fists of Legend.