This is the summer blockbuster you've been waiting for. Everything that was good about Ip Man, is better in Ip Man 2. Everything that was big, is bigger. It's a career highlight for all three of the creative forces involved: star Donnie Yen, co-star and action choreographer, Sammo Hung, and director Wilson Yip. It's a rousing Canto-fable, a Hong Kong empowerment movie, a return to old school martial arts filmmaking with AVATAR-era production values, and on its opening weekend it beat Iron Man 2 at the box office like a redheaded stepchild.

No knowledge of Ip Man 1 is necessary. Driven out of Foshan by the Japanese, we pick up the Ip Man story in 1949 as Master Ip (Donnie Yen) arrives in Hong Kong. Wife pregnant, money short, friends scarce, he sets up a martial arts school but no Hong Kong people want to study with the weird, tea-sipping dude from China. It doesn't take long to figure out the problem: Master Hung (Sammo Hung) runs the martial arts schools in Hong Kong with an iron fist, extorting “fees” and paying off the corrupt British cops. But nobody puts Donnie Yen in the corner, and soon enough he's standing on a rickety table in a tea house, putting down masters one by one in order to purchase his right to teach wing chun with payments made in nothing but knuckles.

Wing chun is the sissy kung fu, invented by a Buddhist nun and long derided in the martial world. But it's what Ip Man taught Bruce Lee and it's what Sammo Hung has spent a large part of his career extolling. Fluid and graceful, Ip Man 2 makes the case that while wing chun may have been invented by Buddhist nuns, these particular Buddhist nuns were not fooling around.

Donnie Yen was born to play Ip Man, and Sammo Hung is a study in gravitas as he shows that at the age of 58 he’s still capable of pulling out all the stops. Anyone can instantly follow this story, so don't let the fact that it's a sequel scare you away. In fact, just think of that 2 in the title as a way of saying it's twice as good as any other movie currently on the market.