Ip Man 3 (2015, Yip Wai Shun) (Patreon)

38/100

Severely diminishing returns in this third installment, which barely tweaks its predecessor's clumsy/clichéd narrative and offers comparatively little in the way of kickass martial-arts setpieces. I continue to be irritated by primary screenwriter Edmond Wong's penchant for introducing two all-but-unrelated threats—in this case, a rival seeking to dethrone Ip and a vicious gang trying to close an elementary school so that Mike Tyson can build something on the underlying land—then constantly interrupting both with a hackneyed subplot involving Ip's wife (pregnant last time, dying of cancer this time). And while my attention certainly spiked during action sequences, nothing here is remotely as memorable as the original's feather duster routine or the second film's tabletop faceoff. Just a lot of furious pummeling, plus the climactic pole and butterfly sword fight between Ip and the dude who I guess becomes Master Z in the movie that I actually felt compelled by strong reviews to see in the first place? (Wikipedia is oddly unclear on this point.) Even that sequence concludes in the most perfunctory way imaginable, with—I kid you not—Maybe Future Master Z poking Ip in the eye, which rattles him so much that he immediately wraps things up via a single wind-knocking-out blow to MFMZ's torso. That might actually be quite realistic, but the film as a whole is so bland that verisimilitude in this respect does it zero favors. Anyway, I've now fulfilled my pointless self-inflicted prerequisites and can move on to Master Z: Ip Man Legacy, which was directed rather than merely choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping and will hopefully be far more impressive than any of these three.