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Wong Kar-wai’s strained story about Bruce Lee’s trainer lacks the emotional power of his best work

• First-look review: The Grandmaster

Wong Kar-wai laboured for years on this weighty martial-arts movie that first appeared in a longer cut at last year’s Berlin film festival. It is by turns intriguing, exasperating, beguiling. The Grandmaster is a distinctive piece of work, a deeply felt homage to the art form of kung fu and the art form of movies about kung fu. But it also feels like a slightly self-conscious piece of ancestor-worship, straining against an inertia of its own making. The Grandmaster is not a masterpiece, and compared to the blazing and compelling emotional reality of Wong’s magnificent In the Mood for Love (2000), it looks artificial and slight. The film is an elaborate, stylised cine-ballet inspired by the life of Ip Man, master of the wing chun discipline of...

Plot76% Acting79% Directing73% Music71%Some very interesting segments, both action-wise and story-wise.Never quite reaches its full potential. 75%Overall Score Reader Rating: (4 Votes)91%Horizontal Vs Vertical

“The Grandmaster” ( or “The Grandmasters” depending on your location ) is director Kar Wai Wong‘s first attempt at the kung-fu genre. His most notable successes have mostly been about the pain of lost romance ( “My Blueberry Nights“, “2046” and “In The Mood For Love” instantly come to mind ) so it’s no surprise that “Yi Dai Zong Shi” is a mixed bag of good and bad.

The story spans a few decades, starting in the early 1930′s. The premise of the movie is simple enough:Gong Yutian ( Qingxiang Wang ), a renowned master of China’s Southern and Northern styles of martial arts, comes to town to celebrate his eventual retirement. It’s at the Golden Pavilion, the number one brothel in the region, that he decides to make the big announcement.

Check out your second look at some rockin’ new footage from Wong Kar-wai’s “The Grandmasters”, which features Tony Leung Chiu Wai (“Lust, Caution”) as Ip Man fighting a gazilion guys in the rain. There is voiceover narration talking about kung fu, but it’s in Chinese. That’s over pretty quick, and then it’s just the action. Wong Kar-wai hasn’t done action since “Ashes of Time” in the ’80s, and it looks like he’s been saving up all that kung fu-ness for now, with the help of action choreographer extraordinaire Yuen Woo-ping. Welcome back, Wong! In martial arts there is no right or wrong, only the last man standing. The film co-stars Ziyi Zhang, Chen Chang, Cung Le, Hye-kyo Song, Siu-Lung Leung, Julian Cheung, Benshan Zhao, and Qingxiang Wang. Originally slated for 2011, the film has now been pushed back to either late 2011 or early 2012. Who knows with Wong,...