Young Ip man - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Young Ip Man



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
I have to give it to Donnie Yen. The man single handedly created a character that was so beloved that the entire martial arts industry has simply copied and recopied the character like they did with Bruce Lee exploitation films after the man’s untimely death, or legendary characters like Fong Sai Yuk. The original Donnie Yen films were fantastic to good (they were petering out at the end of the series), but everyone and their mother has created prequels, sequels, alternate reality takes on the character to the point that it’s simply expected to see another Ip Man film every 6 months to a year. This time it’s a prequel of Ip Man during his school days, and it fares about as well as one could expect with that premise (which means, not very good)
Ip Man (Zhao Whenhao) has come to Hong Kong from Foshan to gain more skills and knowledge, but along the way runs into an old family friend. Turns out, said friend is involved in a kidnapping plot at the local school, where escaped criminal Ma Long is holding the students hostage for money. Involve a sub plot of a crooked police inspector, a love story, and the fact that Ma Long is actually Ip Man’s old chess and tactics instructor, and we have a stupid mess of a film that feels thin on plot despite being only 79 minutes long (including credits).

Needless to say, Young Ip Man is essentially a cartoon chop socky flick that uses the name of Ip Man as a marketing tool rather than having ANYTHING to do with the character at all. That is outside of having the name attached. With that said, Young Ip Man is still a rather weak movie. It suffers from a paper thing kidnapping plot, mediocre choreography (although Zhao Wenhao does a solid job with his martial arts skill, it’s just that the choreography is very choppy and stiff). CGI is really bad (him throwing the books at the ninja minion is pretty painfully obvious), and the English translation is really awkward.

Simply put, Young Ip Man is a low budget Hi-Yah!! film that is just what one would expect of a DTV movie knockoff of a much more popular film (or set of films in this case). It’s cheesy (and not in the good way), poorly acted, and poorly fought. A trifecta that is basically the curse of death for a Kung-Fu film. I have a huge affinity for Hong Kong film making and martial arts films in general, but I can’t excuse this level of lazy copy-catting going on with the Ip Man “sequels”.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Presented in the typical 2.39:1 AVC scope framing, Young Ip Man looks rather nice on Blu-ray. It’s not going to be exquisitely detailed, nor is it a demo worthy film, but the encode is very bright and cheerful looking, with strong primary shades and decent detail levels. I couldn’t help but notice that though it is a nice looking film, there is a distinctly soft look to many scenes, with some banding thrown in for some of the darker shots (such as when the smoke screen is used to get Jack out of the room from his captors). It gets even softer when we’re using a fight scene with a high level of CGI (such as the library fight with the female assassin). It’s not a horribly bad image, but it is weirdly smooth and doesn’t sport as high a detail level as I would have liked.









Audio:

Well Go USA has given us both an English dub and original Mandarin track in DTS-HD MA 5.1 lossless (and a companion 2.0 Dolby Digital track for night listening as well) which fares the same as the video. It’s a good track, but never really great. Vocals are crisp and clean, located up front like expected, and surround activity during battles are nicely immersive. I did notice that the LFE channel was surprisingly “meh”, with only a small amount of low end present during punches and kicks and crashes. Overall, this is simply a “good” track that does everything competently, but never goes above and beyond that base line competency.












Extras:

• Original Trailer
• Well Go USA Trailers

Final Score: ​

Yeah, it’s not hard to see that I’m not a fan of Young Ip Man. The movie just didn’t do much for me, and is much like most of the other DTV Hi-Yah!! films that Well Go USA has been focusing on lately. The Blu-ray looks and sounds rather nice, but comes with the typical dearth of extras that these films are known to have. My personal recommendation. Don’t even bother.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Pantheras Freedman, Feng-bin Mou, Jonathan Kos-Read, Wenhao Zhao
Directed by: Liming Li
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, Mandarian DTS-HD MA 5.1, English, Mandarin DD 2.0
Subtitles: English
Studio: Well Go USA
Rated: NR
Runtime: 79 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: May 16th, 2023

Recommendation: Skip It

 

[austinblackboxspace]

thanks for this. i was just looking at this disc a Waterloo Records yesterday here in Austin.