The Grandmaster

Saw it last night. Huge fan of the genre and of the first Ip Man movie.

That said, this one missed the mark for me. It really dragged at times. Was extremely slow. Took a really thin plot and stretched the shite out of it into an excessively long movie.

It was nicely shot and had some awesome fight sequences but a lot of them fell on the wrong side of that thin line between artistic and overproduced. Excessive slow motion and weird camera angles really detracted from some beautiful choreography at times.

It was billed and started off as a hero story, but somewhere along the way, the movie abandons this structure and becomes a love story between two kindred spirits and finally goes completely off the rails in the last act, in which Ip Man's character is reduced to the role of observer/narrator and the story focuses on this female character.

I found myself looking at my watch, waiting for it to end. I'm not someone who is against slower-pace Kung fu movies. Yimou Zhang is one of my favorite directors (House of Flying Daggers is one of my favorite movies of all time and I loved Curse of the Golden Flower and Hero) but this movie just didn't hook me the way Zhang's do.

Grandmaster was tedious and getting through it felt like a chore. Pretty disappointing after I'd been anticipating this movie for months.