Ip Man 2 - Teaser

[Beat TG]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov3SMFCoyfQ

[wongfeihung62]

I thought the first film was great, Donnie Yen was excellent as Ip Man. So looking forward to this sequel and Sammo's in it as well ,using Hung Kuen from his stance in the trailer.

[KMGor]

I got around to seeing it recently. It's enjoyable enough, but not nearly as good as the original. The villain of the film (who doesn't really emerge until there's only a half hour left) is a borderline racist caricature of violent European A-holes of the era. The plot has little structure. The wire fu doesn't always fit in so well (especially when Sammo Hung flies around). There's an idea blatantly stolen from Bullet in the Head (which serves almost no purpose at all, and could have been deleted).

Still though, lots of great fighting. Worth a watch.

[Brian Thibodeau]

It pains me that some Hong Kong/Chinese filmmakers still insist on importing low-rent caucasian/black/other ethnic actors to play key villain roles like this in their films. If casting a C-Grade actor—who just happens to be a good martial artist—like Darren Shahlavi is the best they can do in 2010, on an A-list production, I pity them.

I understand that Chinese and Asians have not always been portrayed in a positive light in American/European cinema, but at least in American cinema they often cast Asian actors who can actually act if given the right opportunity, and don't draw attention to themselves because of their limitations of craft. There are better ways to "stick it to the west" than by casting flat actors as one-dimensional racist characters, and one of those ways would be the hiring of professional "name" performers from the west who could at least have a chance at infusing even a simple "racist villain" role with a little dimension. But I suppose that would require slight script rewrites that wouldn't pander to preconceived notions (often oversimplified, though certainly in the right direction) of contemporary Chinese about foreigners of the olden days.

Digging up never-weres and friends-of-Donnie like Shahlavi, no matter how good their martial arts skills may be, only leads to ridicule from western critics (as his casting elicited from Variety or THR as I recall) and a quick dismissal of the filmmakers ability to get at more serious "issues" in a meaningful way that crosses international boundaries. This works both ways, of course, and I believe Hollywood deserves many brickbat it has ever received for portraying "foreign" cultures as barbaric, etc. I'm also aware that many Hong Kong and China filmmakers DO cast respectable "western" talent in their productions, and the films usually benefit from better-drawn characters. Hell, I'd take one Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI or even one Paul Rudd in GEN-Y COPS (yes, an Edison Chen movie!) over ten appearances by Darren Shahlavi any day, impressive though the man's martial skills are. His appearance makes me worry that the return of Mark Houghton is just around the corner. Granted, I'll still watch the movies he's in, but I would have anyway.

Who knows, maybe Donnie rightly figures that non-fanbase western audiences are only going to watch something like IP MAN 2 for the fights anyways, so better to pander to the home (Chinese) audience with two-bit gwailo stereotypes that are as laughable now (at least to westerners) as they were in Hong Kong movies 20 or 30 years ago. Me, I'd like to think that modern Chinese audiences are sophisticated enough to handle western characters that can be evil without being caricatures (especially the kind that only make the righteousness of Chinese heroes seem hollow because their opponents are essentially straw men), and played by faces they know with from all the western cinema they've been watching for years now, but maybe that's just me.