They're annoying and imperious - Ip Man's martial arts school is muscling in on their turf, darn it - but they're certainly a limber group of seniors. Instead of sadistic Japanese occupiers, we now have cartoonishly slimy British expats and a clubby old group of rival kung fu masters. Whereas "Ip Man" was set in mainland China during the late 1930s, "Ip Man 2" takes place in Hong Kong after his arrival there with wife and son. Slim, mild-mannered and committed to the Confucian principles of the Chinese martial arts, Master Ip approaches his opponents with an otherworldly calm that explodes in a flurry of darting kicks and punches when circumstances require. He can use just about anything to beat the snot out of just about anyone, but he never revels in this ability. It was a magnificent, ridiculous, audaciously overwrought story, which included a delightful bit in which he uses a feather duster to beat the snot out of a sword-wielding bully. That was in the first "Ip Man," released in 2008 and directed, like this one, by Wilson Yip. You wouldn't know it from the movies, but the real Ip Man used opium and worked as a cop, and never went mano-a-mano with a kung-fu fighting Japanese general. Ip Man (also spelled Yip Man) was a revered practitioner whose many illustrious students included Bruce Lee. Wing Chun is a form of kung fu that combines offense and defense in fleet, close maneuvers. That's doubly true when our hero is Ip Man (Donnie Yen), the hallowed Wing Chun instructor of Hong Kong and the transcendently awesome butt-kicker of "Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster." If there is one cardinal rule of action movies, it's this: Any sneering bad guy who informs the hero that he's "making a big mistake" is, at that very moment, making an exceptionally big one.
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