Kung fu and boxing violence, with the usual cracking, crunching and splattering. “Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Hung) whose pride and aging body turn a great fight into a moving display of human frailty and resilience. Among the most graceful to waver at the edge is a graybeard with a Buddha belly (a wonderful Mr. In one jaw-dropper, Ip Man goes up against a handful of academy masters one at a time while balanced on a teetering tabletop: the first to fall loses.

Choreographed by the film martial-arts veteran Sammo Hung, the fights are spectacularly designed and performed, relying more on muscle and skill than wirework. With the exception of an overextended, two-part smackdown featuring a brutish British boxer (Darren Shahlavi), the director Wilson Yip keeps the movie moving as fast as the whiplash action. It’s only a matter of time before the rivals become as one against the British, though happily the nationalist fist-pumping sometimes found in mainstream Chinese productions comes with a whole lot of fancy fist- and footwork.

Like the rivalry among the schools, the family’s struggles turn out to be just one part of a larger story of imperialism run amok on Chinese land. While his wife frets about the bills, he worries about the future from his rooftop academy where the swooping cameras, drying laundry and human bodies are in constant whirl. There’s a touch more to this story, including pinched pennies and a new pregnancy, as Ip Man opens his school and attracts his first recruits, most of whom are as poor as he is. First, though, he has to match wits and blows with a shady consortium of Hong Kong martial arts schools and the corrupt British government representatives cracking the state whip. (The legend has been disputed and is playfully riffed on in the 1994 movie “Wing Chun,” featuring Michelle Yeoh and a high-flying tray of trembling tofu.) Generations later Ip Man, now the keeper of the Wing Chun flame, seeks to popularize the system. Though a boy named Bruce stops by briefly, no women enter the school, a shame given that this style of kung fu has been traced through the centuries to when a young female tofu seller, Wing Chun, learned how to fight from a Buddhist nun, Ng Mui, and then passed her knowledge on. There, with his wife and son, Ip Man sets up his humble home and labors to open a martial arts academy, a place where true believers can perfect the ancient physical art of Wing Chun. The dynamo at the center of “Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster” doesn’t leap over buildings in a single bound, but he comes entertainingly close to superhero status.īased on the life of Bruce Lee’s martial arts teacher, Ip Man - played with a quick smile and flying fists by Donnie Yen - this sequel to “Ip Man” picks up after the title character has fled his mainland Chinese home for Hong Kong (a flight repeated in helpful flashback).

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