Ye Wen: Zong shi jue xing

The story line was boring and definitely not attention catching. The action scenes were really great but apart from that. Boring and totally bad compared to the previous IP MAN movies.

One reviewer stated that it slaps Donnie Yen in the face; I didn't really mind that they cast Tse Miu (who oddly is not listed in the casting) to play Yen's character at a young age, his acting was actually decent. But the problem wasn't that Yen wasn't cast, it's that it lacked Wilson Yip's directorial magic, and Edmond Wong's creative writing - both of whom did all the previous Ip Man films (I've seen them all) that made me a fan of the franchise. The real slap in the face goes to those two, because it's evident this film was missing their magical touches, especially the fight scenes.

Here, you have two directors in this one - Li Xi Jie and Zhang Zhu Lin, and Fang Lan and Liu Bayin as writers, who instead gave us 1980's slow-mo cheesy and sappy scenes. Some of the choreography, especially at the beginning, was just as bad as the writing and directing.

Although the cinematography was up to par as the previous films, and the actual story had its merits, the rest of the production was a let-down of my expectations. Would I recommend this one? Well, if you're a fan of the franchise, it's a decent (but not great) origin story, so I'd say yes. But don't have high expectations like I did, as this production if far from the greatness we'd expect from Yip and Wong. Hopefully this mess inspires them to give up a better origin film. Sadly, it's a generous 6/10 from me, most going to the cast who I'm sure tried their best with what they were given.

Looks like the IP MAN character is still capable of bringing in a few pennies, hence we have THE AWAKENING, a prequel film made on the Chinese mainland. There are no familiar cast members in this one and the story, in which the future hero tackles some local street thugs and gangsters, is absolutely negligible. What this does have going for it are some fairly commendable production values which at least get the scenery semi-convincing for the era, and a great deal of fight scenes which I found more than adequate considering the low budget nature of the production. Not the kind of film to set the world on fire, but it'll do...

I feel like this was a prank that went too far sorta thing. Like they knew it was a joke but after all the work they put into it wanted to see how it would go being a feature film.

The acting was so bad that I feel sorry for the extras having been conned into this obvious train-wreck.

The fight scenes weren't too bad but I feel as though the director kept telling the lead actor to NOT imitate Donnie Yen like they knew they didn't have permission and would be sewed for copyright.

In conclusion, if it were actually possible to sue someone for wasting my time.... I would with this film.

I will not recommend pay to watch because its really wasting money. The story is just below average same as other versus gangster stories. The story nothing to phrase on and very predictable from start to end.

A lot of the storyline are very illogical and total nonsense. The acting are poor and worse the main Ip Man cast a young man still in college but the actor is so old with wrinkles! The make-up is so poorly invested and everything is so budgeted.

The directorship is poor, stunt is poor, story is below average, acting poor, effects poor, stunts poor, nothing is good!

I cannot give more than 4/10 because this is one of the worse martial arts movie I had watched in 2021 and 2022! It really brought down the Ip Man series of movies. The quality is like year pre 1997 when HK movie industry trying to make more money (before HK handover) by quantity and neglect quality.