Stoutor
It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
Gutsycurene
Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.
Sarita Rafferty
There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
Leofwine_draca
THE FINAL MASTER is another mainland Chinese martial arts film which comes across as an open copy of the splendid IP MAN franchise. Sadly, the writing is all over the place here, turning what is a very straightforward storyline into something obtuse and obscure, with rival characters dominating the screen and a choppy narrative to boot. The hero, a Wing Chun master striving to prove his supremacy in a town filled with other masters, comes across as arrogant and selfish, his wife even more so. It says something when the only likeable characters in the film are the couple's dog and a cameo from legendary Shaw Brothers tough guy Chen Kuan Tai. The film's action scenes aren't too shabby, featuring some intricate choreography at times, but when there's no vestige of a decent plot to support them then it doesn't really matter all that much.
jingtuzi333
this is quite a good movie, at least for the past few years it has to be one of the best kong fu/ fighting movies. however it is quite subtle, and the relationships are complicated, i'm afraid the foreigners may not understand this, if you are only looking for some action scene then...well , this is not that shallow.
Alison
Tianjin in 1932 is full of martial arts schools, and there are strict rules for bringing in new ones. So when Master Chen (Liao Fan) comes to town with the aim of starting his own school, he finds that he must first recruit one or more apprentices, train them for three years and then have them defeat no less than 8 of the established schools before getting one of his own. But the person defeating those schools might be exiled from Tianjin forever, and there are more forces than the school masters who have a stake in the outcome…. About halfway through this film, I realized I had completely lost the plot, but as a friend of mine pointed out, by the halfway point plot is kind of meaningless anyway; one watches this film for the beautifully choreographed fight scenes and admiration for how sophisticated martial arts can be. I've not seen a million of these films, but have seen more than a few, and what most intrigued me about this one was its setting; most martial arts films that I've seen are set in the distant or at least centuries'- ago past, whereas this is 1932, relatively modern and complete with Caucasian extras throughout the story-line. And of course, short years before complete mayhem erupted there. Interesting!
BasicLogic
This film have signed up several famous actors and actresses to play the key roles in it. For these actors, acting on such poorly crafted, so pretentious, laughable screenplay were no fun at all. The laughable dialog of this film controlled their acting and have forced all of them to become poor actors through and through. The whole movie just looked so extremely pretentious that you have to force yourself going back to the laughable Shaw Brothers' Kung-Fu martial art era to watch this similar film like watching a Shaw Brothers' product in complete 'Emperor's New Clothes', the only difference is new stunt choreographs, new settings, new costumes and new pretentious characters and worst of all, nudity that almost never appeared in Shaw Brothers' Kung-Fu films.The fighting scenes in this film was exactly like what we have seen in those Shaw Brothers' shallow and superfluous martial art films, the fights between or among those roles were extremely choreographically staged, all the participants, leading or not leading in this film were trying so hard to look dramatically cool, yet at the same time unavoidably and inevitably became so pretentious and poor in performance since every movement including their facial expressions were guided under one of the worst screenplay and dialog that every appeared in a major budgeted films.The screenplay was just horrible, the characters created in this film were just terrible, albeit absurd. Since the lousy dialog controlled the flow of the moronic scenario and plot, everybody just became poor actor. My heart went out to the female young actress who had to expose her naked body and flesh so unnecessarily, those scenes were required by the screenplay, the director and the investors to make her signing-up money worthy. The crab eating habit was another stupid and meaningless arrangement. As long as the stupid screenplay and plots went, it just became more and more pretentious and ridiculous. The only benefit of shooting and producing this film was so many background supporting actors made some money to pay their bills, and nothing more.In summary, this was one of the most pretentious and laughable films added to the Chinese martial art genre. Still watchable, but first, you have to put yourself in a numb and trance-line self-hypnotized condition like trying to read the high school textbooks.
