With the success of the Ip Man films, it was perhaps only a matter of time before wily Hong Kong producers figured out a way to capitalize on the newly popular character. We have our first official entry in the knock-off category with Herman Yau's The Legend is Born - Ip Man. Despite having some of the same cast and crew as the Ip Man movies with Donnie Yen, The Legend is Born lives up (or, rather, down) to the lineage of cinematic clones and comes off like a pale shadow of the films that inspired it.

The Legend is Born concentrates on roughly the childhood through college-age years of Ip Man, a practitioner of the Wing Chun style of kung fu who would go on to become one of Bruce Lee's martial arts teachers. Taking a cue from Lee's Fist of Fury, the story here has Man (played by Dennis To, who creepily does look a lot like Donnie Yen at points) trying to defend his school (run by Yuen Biao) from a group of dastardly Japanese, who want to use the school as a front to smuggle in spies.

Of course, this event, and related ones like Man having to fight off groups of ninjas, never really happened, so if you're coming into this movie wanting to gain a greater understanding of the early life of Ip Man, you're not going to get that here. In fact, if you weren't or aren't familiar with Ip Man coming into this, then you could be forgiven for thinking that The Legend is Born is just another average Hong Kong kung fu movie, which it really is. You don't end up learning much (if anything) about Ip Man or Wing Chun, or even just general history of the time. Storywise, the film instead seems to be satisfied meandering about in dull exposition scenes that retread the same melodramatics present in dozens of similar productions.

Business does pick up a bit when it comes to the fight scenes, which were helmed by the veteran action director Tony Leung Siu-Hung (according to some reports, he had some assistance from Sammo Hung, who also has a small role in the film). Some of the fights, especially those featuring Fan Siu-Wong, who is playing a different role than he did in the Donnie Yen Ip Man films, are great fun. Fan really should be a bigger star than he is, which is shown once again here via his extremely solid work on both the action and acting side of things.

Unfortunately, the same level of quality to doesn�t extend to all the fisticuffs, some instances of which feature very obvious and out of place wirework and undercranking. There's no extremely poor fight scenes, but it�s kind of obvious that the film-makers decided to key on a few particular scenes, and let the rest fall by the wayside, hoping that the audience would be enchanted enough with things like the cuteness of the females participating that they wouldn�t notice the shortcomings in the potency of the brawling.

But the audience (well, at least this reviewer) did notice those shortcomings, and many others present in this production. The Legend is Born isn't a terrible movie, but it is a bit bland and slow-paced, and delivers nowhere near the quality and excitement of the previous movies about Ip Man. If you've already seen both Ip Man movies and are in the mood for more, you'd probably be better off waiting for the inevitable Ip Man 3.

RATING: 5