Thus, when a group of cocky out-of-town folks believe they can trample on the reputation of Foshan by beating all the martial artists, of course they will eventually land on Ip's doorstep as well. That sets up a terrific, prolonged fight sequence that shows the countless, lightning-quick punches Ip can land on his opponent's face and chest in the blink of an eye and how he uses merely the stick of a window duster to defeat an opponent with a large sword. When he wins the battle, the whole town including the local cop, Li Zhao (Ka Tung Lam), praises him as a hero.
All of that fills the generally lighthearted half hour of the movie but it turns out to actually be a setup for the sudden transition into the darker historical event of Japanese military occupation during WWII. Information in captions reveal the town's population is decimated by three-quarters by the Japanese soldiers, thriving factories are destroyed, and the remaining people's properties are confiscated, including that of Ip, who is forced into abject poverty and must look for menial labor to barely feed his wife and son. He finally swallows his pride to work at the coal mines despite not having the right clothes to wear for the job (echoes here of Russell Crowe’s Jim Braddock during the Great Depression from Cinderella Man).
One day Li, who is now working as an interpreter for Japanese soldiers, comes to the coal mine to try to recruit any Chinese people to challenge and fight students of a Japanese martial arts training school in order to win bags of rice. Ip is initially uninterested in this but a tragedy that hits close to home shakes up his personal patriotism and hence he goes to the training school himself, which sets up a far fiercer fight sequence where he challenges ten Japanese students and shows his fearsome and bone-crunching might and a style of punching for which the word “swift” is a severe understatement. This, of course, grabs the attention of the head Japanese General Miura (Hiroyuki Heichi) and his sadistic guard, Sato (Shibuya Tenma), and embroils Ip in progressively greater conflict even though he quietly tries to work in the small fabric factory mill his friend Zhou has just started.
This kind of general story outline will be familiar to fans of the martial arts genre whose films such as Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury and Jet Li’s Fist of Legend are very often propelled by the feeling of Chinese nationalistic pride and no wonder considering the endless tyrannical savagery that the Japanese people inflicted throughout Chinese history. The visual palette by cinematographer Sing-Pui O reflects that when, once the occupation starts, it switches to a grayer, ashen-like color scheme that suggests the town Ip Man is in has become almost like a tomb both physically and mentally. Some people starve to death when unable to scrape a meager living and others who cannot find jobs become bandits wielding axes to extract money out of factory owners, and director Wilson Yip (who is a regular collaborator with Donnie Yen) and writer Edmond Wong are able to subtly suggest more than show the near-dooming atmosphere to full dramatic weight within a brisk and efficiently paced 106 minute running time.
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