YMMV / Ip Man 4

• Anvilicious:
  • The school bullying scene and the subsequent fallout (victim is screwed be it fight or flight due to school punishment rules and the bully taking advantage of adult ignorance to play the victim card in case of injury received from fighting back) is never resolved at all, making Becky a Karma Houdini. This is very much Truth in Television, as any kid who tried to fight back and wind up getting punished alongside their bully can attest to. This is a problem that is still happening today.
  • Just because you are the parent doesn't automatically mean you are the one to automatically know what's best. Your children has their own interests to pursue. This is a problem that is still happening in modern parenting especially in Asia, with most parents focusing on maximizing obedience to the extent that when they become adults, the children suffer from massive dependence issues.
• Awesome Moments: See here.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The earthquake. It serves to interrupt Ip' and Wan's duel, but has little effect on them, doesn't even make them bond over their respective reactions or anything similar, and is never mentioned afterwards. Given that it was a rather small quake, it is not even clear why Ip and Wan cannot continue their duel outside right after instead of leaving it for the festival, making it even less consequential.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Bruce Lee and his American students are very popular. The former for his fight scene and the latter for showing that there are indeed good foreigners out there, something that has been lacking in the previous three films, even when historical context is taken into account.
• Funny Moments: See here.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The racism portrayed in the film, such as the bullying Yonah faces at school due to being Chinese may be a harder to watch now, as Accented Cinema stated in his essay for the film, since that Asian Americans have become a target of harassment during the COVID-19 Pandemic, months after the film released in theaters.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This would not be the last time Donnie Yen has to deal with Scott Adkins as an antagonist.
• Memetic Mutation: Ip Man's response "Something like that." has became a very popular response quote.
• Moral Event Horizon: Barton Geddes crosses it when he decides to brutalize Wan by breaking his arm and shattering his knee even though at this point he already won the match only doing it just to prove a point about "superior" martial arts. He then makes his marines clap for his display of brutality against the old grandmaster.
• Narm: Even if he's surely a horrible villain, Geddes can be hard to take seriously due to how over-the-top evil he is, as well as how little sense his whole character makes (he despises kung fu for being an Asian fighting style, yet he claims the superiority of karate, another Asian style, and in one scene he half-tries to hide his racism, only for him to voice it gleefully a moment later). At some point, one might perfectly forget about his characterization and just see him as a buffoonish and comically over-the-top bad guy Ip Man needs to beat this time.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • At the start of the film, Master Wan claims that Western people are evil, vicious beasts to illustrate why Lee should not be teaching kung fu to them. This is ostensibly used to show that Asian people can be also racist and unreasonable themselves, which is a laudable point to make in a film approaching those topics. There's a problem with it, though: Wan happens to be more or less right, as there are maybe only a couple important white characters in the cast that are not racist, petty and brutal to some degree, or at least apathetic to those ordeals. As the matter with Lee is only barely addressed in the film, the viewer might leave the theater with the impression that Wan was actually pretty justified in trying to keep their knowledge away from being potentially used by people like Geddes, the karate fighters, the police, and Becky and her gang. Towards the end, Ip Man even acknowledges Wan's points to some ambiguous, open-ended degree even though he stops short of agreeing that Westerners are evil by telling Wan that he came to the conclusion that the grass wasn't always greener on the other side and ultimately decides not to move to the United States with his son.
  • Becky may be a vengeful, racist bully, but the argument she gives to their cheerleading coach - that Yonah broke completely away from the team's mandated pattern, thus making it inappropriate that she is given a thumbs up - is technically right, and is never disputed.
  • Colin Frater and Barton Geddes call Chinese kung fu as a whole "useless" and we are supposed to side against them. However, with the exception of Ip Man, Bruce Lee and Master Wan, every other master in the film gets defeated by a US Marine karate coach during the festival in a few hits, with a Staff Sergeant repeating the same result soon after, effectively proving their point. In defense of the masters, a lot of the fights were determined by the karate fighter's superior physicality, not in a pure skill-for-skill battle, but given that the only kung fu master that manages to hold their own is a woman, it's clear the movie doesn't run on those parameters.
• Tear Jerker: As a Grand Finale of the series, this is to be expected.
  • The relationship between Ip Man and his second son Ip Ching is more or less strained, it is not helped by the fact that their wife/mother Cheung Wing-sing died in the same year and that Ip Man is slowly dying of lung cancer doesn't makes things any better. Thankfully after hearing that his dad is slowly dying, Ching reconciles with his father before his passing.
  • The ending pays tribute to the Ip Man franchise by showing all of the fights from the previous three movies from all the years we've seen and for it to end makes it sad. What really drives this home is the last shot, showing Ip Man with his wife on his shoulder, which then leads us to...
  • The death and funeral of Ip Man in the ending with his former student Bruce Lee attending it to pay respects to his deceased master.
    • For those who know of Bruce Lee's past, during that funeral scene, Lee was 32 years old. Not long after Ip Man's passing, Bruce Lee himself passed away just three months before his 33rd birthday.
    • If that is not enough, Bruce Lee's son Brandon Lee also passed away, being accidentally shot on set during the filming of The Crow (1994).
  • The last words spoken in the film: "I will demonstrate once. Film it."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The big, burly karateka played by Mark Strange that challenges Lee. He's the only American opponent who gets portrayed sympathetically, showing no apparent racism and even giving a thumbs up to Lee after being beaten, so it can feel like a lost chance that he never appears again in the film.
  • Bruce Lee and his students were stuck taking care of the CBA masters after their appearances, leaving Ip Man alone to represent Chinese kung fu against Colin Frater and Barton Geddes. Having him and his students help out would've proved Ip Man's point in breaking harmful stereotypes and while showing that he isn't the exception.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • The film's official poster represents a wise, traditionally-dressed Chinese man facing the modern United States army. Given that this franchise's version of Ip Man is already heavily tweaked to make the character more patriotic and sympathetic to the modern day Chinese Communist Party, it's hard to be more explicit.
  • When the Chinese masters are getting brutalized by the karate coach, Hartman lowers his camera and refuses to record, only raising it when Ip Man shows up and beats the coach. Many viewers argue that this is the perfect example of the idealized view of kung fu among its proponents and the Chinese government.