Ip Man 4: The Finale (2019)

Ip Man 4: The Finale arrives as the fourth and purportedly last installment of a franchise that has spent a decade teaching audiences that Wing Chun solves most problems and creates several new ones. This time the grandmaster, played with weary dignity by Donnie Yen, travels from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1964 to secure a school placement for his son. What he finds is a Chinatown power structure, a Marine base full of karate enthusiasts, and a great deal of anti-Chinese hostility. The film's dramatic engine is racial grievance, plainly stated and repeatedly discussed. Racist cheerleaders, a xenophobic immigration officer, and a gunnery sergeant who insults everyone within earshot all push the plot forward. The bigotry is the plot. This is a Chinese production telling a Chinese story about Chinese dignity, so the casting reads as organic, with a Black INS officer and a Black Marine in supporting roles and no commentary attached.

The women get a brief moment of dignity. Wan's daughter Yonah fights back against a bully, and Ip Man endorses her decision, a small progressive gesture inside a narrative that still treats women as the spark for male confrontation. Beyond that, the film has no interest in other contemporary preoccupations. There is no environmental lament, no critique of wealth, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent characters. The politics on offer are cultural and national, delivered with a moderate amount of speechifying. Characters pause to explain the immigrant experience and the wrongness of bigotry, though most of the moral argument gets absorbed into the punching, which is the more honest delivery mechanism.

As history, the film is loose in the way martial arts biopics are always loose. It invents a Marine Corps kung fu showdown and closes with onscreen text claiming the Marines formally adopted Chinese kung fu in 2001, a tidy flourish that genre convention permits and historians would dispute. It is a sturdy conclusion to a series more interested in choreography than the archive. It lectures a little, fights a lot, and never pretends to be about anything other than what it is.