How Wilson Yip’s first two Ip Man films made Donnie Yen a superstar and the eponymous martial arts legend a hero

For the hit Hong Kong movies Ip Man and Ip Man 2, director Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen set out to make a hero of the eponymous wing chun kung fu pioneer

Sammo Hung’s ‘honest’ kung fu choreography, patriotism and Bruce Lee references feature in the heavily fictionalised films that made Yen and Ip household names

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Donnie Yen in a still from Ip Man. This and the second film in the Ip Man series used a mixture of old-school kung fu, patriotism and embellishments to make the film’s eponymous marital arts a hero and Yen a superstar. Photo: Mandarin Films

Published: 4:15am, 31 Mar 2024

The four Ip Man films directed by Wilson Yip Wai-shun and starring Donnie Yen Ji-dan form one of the all-time great Hong Kong film series.

Below we take an in-depth look at the first two Ip Man films.

Ip Man (2008)

Kung fu films had not been popular in Hong Kong since the early 1990s when Wilson Yip’s Ip Man appeared in cinemas in 2008. Yip’s story about the eponymous martial artist who popularised the wing chun style of the martial art – which he also taught to Bruce Lee – was a smash hit.

Ip Man launched another wave of martial arts films, and finally turned Donnie Yen, who had been working in the industry for over 20 years, into a superstar.

“The first film in the series was really good,” says action film expert and author of The KFM Bruce Lee Society, Carl Fox. “It was one of the first times that Ip Man had been portrayed in a film in a big way, and Donnie Yen was perfectly suited to the role of Ip Man, even though he refused to shave his hair.”

In the first film, Yip and Yen tell a heavily fictionalised story about Ip’s early life in Foshan, China. Ip first shows the power of wing chun kung fu to a rogue band of martial artists, and then suffers under the Japanese occupation.