6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A Wing Chun master has to defeat 8 martial arts schools to open his own school, yet he has become a chess piece to the local power dynamics.
Starring: Fan Liao, Wenli Jiang, Leon Dai, Jia Song (II), Shih-Chieh KingForeign | 100% |
Martial arts | 50% |
Action | 3% |
Period | Insignificant |
Romance | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Mandarin: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Mandarin: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
There is an almost baffling array of various films and television properties about wing chun master Ip Man, including such entries as Ip Man (also available as Ip Man Collector’s Edition), Ip Man 2 (also available as a Ip Man 2 Collector’s Edition ), Ip Man 3 (why no Collector’s Edition, Well Go USA?), The Legend Is Born: Ip Man, Ip Man: The Final Fight, Ip Man, and The Grandmaster. One might think that the history of wing chun is at least relatively well handled given that glut of offerings, but one of The Grandmaster’s scribes, Haofeng Xu, is on hand here as both writer and director of The Final Master, yet another (apparently more fictionalized) story that involves this admittedly fascinating martial art. I was frankly confused by large swaths of The Final Master, to the point that I wasn’t quite sure for whom I should be rooting, but the film is awash in spectacular fight scenes and those action elements may be more than enough to curry favor with folks who have loved previous films of this same general ilk, including all those Ip Man entries listed above.
The Final Master is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists only a 2K DI in its technical database, but this has the sleek, glossy and sometimes slightly flat aspect of digital capture. Detail levels are uniformly high throughout the presentation, this despite some less than optimal lighting conditions and a couple of scenes that actually take place in near darkness. The palette is nicely naturalistic looking, without a glut of obvious or aggressive grading. Fine detail in elements like fabrics, including everything from costumes to upholstery, is generally excellent. Several extreme close-ups give some gut wrenching views of various injuries suffered by the combatants. Xu and cinematographer Tianlin Wang often favor wide angle shots (and even some extreme wide angle shots), and occasionally detail levels can suffer in these moments, albeit in a rather minor fashion. Without much in the way of supplemental material, and without an overly lengthy running time, The Final Master resides comfortably on a BD-25 without any discernable compression anomalies.
I couldn't help but wish The Final Master had been released with a Dolby Atmos or DTS:X track, because this is a film highly reliant on some inventive sound effects, and while the included DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is a superb blend of excellent fidelity and regular surround activity, I had to wonder what pinpoint (and midair) placement of some of the sound effects in the many fight scenes might have done to even further the film's already impressive sonic energy. All of this said, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track regularly offers discrete channelization of individual effects, but also regularly exploits cool panning sounds as some of the long poles utilized "whoosh" through the air in various skirmishes. Dialogue comes through cleanly and clearly despite some boisterous actions scenes, and the film's kind of anachronistically modern score by Wei An also sounds excellently clear.
I had quite a few questions by the time I had made it through The Final Master for the first time, and I have to say even a second parsing of the film didn't help to clarify all that much. The basic outlines of the plot are always more or less clear, but this is one film whose subtexts and nuances may simply have been "lost in translation" for a Western audience. That said, the film is so breathlessly inventive in its fight sequences that any passing qualms end up falling by the wayside, kind of like a combatant suddenly confronted with the force of wing chun. Technical merits are strong, and with caveats duly noted, The Final Master comes Recommended.
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