Ip Man 3 supplants Star Wars as number one at the box office in Singapore. Any film would love to have that as a headline. Who wouldn’t want to make more money than The Force Awakens?

But it’s a misleading quote. Star Wars was already waning when Ip Man 3 was released. Eventually Star Wars would be replaced by some film. That weekend it happened to be Ip Man 3. So, it’s not going to make as much money as Star Wars, but according to Ip Man 3’s producer, Raymond Wong, it should surpass the amount Ip Man 2 made, which broke box office records during its run.

But will Ip Man 3 live up to the legacy of Ip Man 1 & 2, which enjoyed great popularity? Kind of.

According to Donnie Yen, the first Ip Man film is about survival. The second film dealt with Ip Man making a living. In the third installment of the franchise, Ip Man deals with life and death.

The canvas for Ip Man 3 is much smaller than editions one or two. Rather than facing off against the Japanese or the Twister, his concerns are local. No longer does Ip Man have to fight the other local masters for recognition; rather, he is given pride of place at a local restaurant. When the group picture is taken, they all wait for Ip Man so he can be front and center.

Many of you might notice that Ip Man is a very gentle creature by nature. He’d rather solve things peacefully. When his son fights another boy at school, he takes both of the boys home to talk about their fighting skills. According to Yen, the peaceful nature of Ip Man is by design.

“They wanted to make a screen hero who was different than in other films,” says Donnie Yen. “The hero usually want to save the world or preach his particular beliefs or philosophy or martial arts style. But our hero is laid back. He just wants a simple life.”

But watching Ip Man lead a simple life doesn’t make for a compelling movie.

Enter our villain, Frank, played by Mike Tyson. Frank wants the school where Ip Man’s son attends class. Frank dispatches his second, Ma King-Sang (played by Patrick Tam), to take over the school. The violence against the school escalates from threatening the school principle to setting fires at the school to ultimately kidnapping the students.

All along the way, Ip Man thwarts these provocations. He and his students protect the school with the help of fellow Wing Chun practitioner Cheung Tin-Chi (played by Max Zhang). Angered by Ip Man’s interference in his plans, Ma King-Sang sends a Muay Thai fighter to defeat Ip Man.

All these battles and confrontations leave Ip Man no choice but to confront Frank to get him to stop his attacks on the school.

But the fight with Frank is only the penultimate battle in the film. While Ip Man busies himself with trying to save the neighborhood, he neglects his wife, Cheung Wing-Sing (played by Lynn Xiong), who has her own battles to fight.

He is also challenged by Cheung Tin Chi about his legitimacy as the premiere Wing Chun master in Hong Kong. At this point, Ip Man faces the choice of either battling Cheung Tin Chi or spending more time with his wife. He makes the less than obvious choice of spending time rebuilding the relationship with his wife. Because of the way the character is played so quietly, you can see that it is the right choice.

If you quibble that this isn’t how the real story played out, heed the words of Donnie Yen: “We aren’t making a documentary.”

The film itself is a solid example of martial arts storytelling with odd moments here and there that make the film feel a little clunky. Both Ip Man 1 & 2 have better stories, but there is something about the lighter, smaller moments of this film that make it appealing.

At the heart of the film is the battle for the land around the school, which feels completely contrived. The action sets off with bad man Frank saying I want that school and you have two weeks to get it for me. Instantly we have motive and an ominous ticking clock.

In most cases, our hero would just go out and battle all the obstacles in his way until the victorious end. But in Ip Man 3, Ip Man always pays the price for his martial arts activities. When he is being celebrated for his prowess, he forgets to go to dance lessons with his wife. When he guards the school, he forgoes dinner at home. The worst moment comes when he is attacked in an elevator by the Muay Thai fighter while his wife is with him. She gets to see up close the dangerous life that Ip Man leads.

It was dangerous in real life in that elevator, too. During the filming of the scene, Lynn Xiong took an errant punch to the face and shooting had to be halted while she recovered. Behind the scenes footage of this does appear online.

Probably one of the biggest curiosity factors surrounding the film is that producer Raymond Wong stated he was going to use a CGI version of Bruce Lee in the film rather than an actor. All rights for Bruce Lee’s image are divided between his brother Robert Lee, who owns the likeness of Bruce portrayed before Bruce’s marriage, and Bruce’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell. Although Wong had successfully purchased the rights from Robert, he was unable to strike a deal with Cadwell. The thinking is that the Bruce Lee foundation has their own movie plans for Bruce Lee’s likeness.

That’s not to say Bruce Lee isn’t in the movie, because he is, albeit in only two scenes, one of which is pivotal to the story. But his appearance is made in the more traditional way, with the actor Danny Chan Kwok-Kwan portraying him.

The other big curiosity factor for the film is the casting of Mike Tyson in the role of the villain Frank. Frank is just a given, the bad guy at the heart of the movie because the movie needs a bad guy. He’s never given a back story. We don’t know where he came from. We don’t know why he wants the land upon which the school sits. He just does. Frank is bad and he will do bad things to get what he wants.

In other words, hiring Mike Tyson to play the role of Frank is an admirable bit of stunt-casting. If you are worried how Mike Tyson will affect the tenor of the film, it’s not much. He’s only in two scenes. In one, Frank gives Ma-king Sang two weeks to get him the school or else. In the other, Frank and Ip Man fight the fight everyone is waiting for.

To be honest, Mike Tyson is not a strong actor. On screen, he comes across as Mike Tyson and it is hard to see him as anything other than the former heavy-weight champion of the world who would crush his opponents in seconds. And that high-toned voice doesn’t help either. Unusually, it is not nearly as high in real life.

One of the odd choices the film makes is to let Frank speak English to his crew with occasional phrases in Chinese when he wants to get his point across. The disconcerting part is that a man with a much deeper voice dubs in the Chinese phrases, sometimes mid-sentence. Mercifully, Tyson’s screen time is short and his speaking part is limited.

But Tyson was overjoyed to get the role. He was introduced to Ip Man through the movies loaned to him by a friend. The friend was even taught by Donnie Yen’s mother, Bow Sim-mark. When Tyson was questioned about how he got the role in Ip Man 3, he states, “They asked. I said yes.”

Tyson enjoyed playing someone other than Mike Tyson. “I get more money being Mike Tyson, but I hate being Mike Tyson. I like being somebody else and not worrying about offending somebody.”

Tyson got most of his knowledge of Chinese culture from the Shaw Brothers and feels a real affinity for the Chinese people. Tyson admires the Chinese for rising up “from physical and emotional quagmires,” an experience to which he feels he can relate, being an African American.

It was a mutual admiration society between Yen and Tyson on set, with Yen decrying how little time they had to talk together. Most of their time on set was devoted to filming. Yen wanted to get secret boxing tips from Tyson, but there just wasn’t enough time. Yen mentioned that he would stay up late in Hong Kong to catch Tyson’s fights on HBO only to be roundly disappointed at how briefly they lasted. “That’s it?” he would cry at his TV.

The admiration goes both ways. When Donnie Yen was asked how he felt about the fact that both Jackie Chan and Jet Li consider him the best fighter on screen, Tyson immediately broke in with, “They’re telling the truth.” If anybody should know about fighting, it would be Mike Tyson.

When the group discussed the plethora of Ip films being shown, Tyson pointed to Yen and said, “Donnie Yen is the face of Ip Man.”

The fight between Ip Man and Frank is a highlight of the film for the sole reason that you can see fear in Ip Man’s eyes. The outcome is in jeopardy, which is a testament to Donnie Yen’s acting. Tyson is a force of nature trapped in a button-down shirt ready to split apart. He seems overpowering.

In most Ip man fights, no matter what the odds, you always know Ip Man is going to prevail. Ip Man always projects this air of cool confidence. Even in Ip Man 2 when the Twister (a boxer gifted with more than his share of muscles) repeatedly knocks Ip Man to the canvas, you never doubted that Ip Man was going to get up and win the fight. It was something in the characters’s eyes that said he was not going to be defeated.

In the fight against Frank, you didn’t see that certainty. You saw fear. Ip Man gave Frank barrage after barrage of his most deadly punches only to have Frank shrug them off. After Ip Man is knocked to the ground for the third time, the camera zooms in on a bloody welt rising on Ip Man’s face, and you can see doubt in his eyes. You can see Ip Man considering his options and finding none.

Maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but that sense of genuine jeopardy made it feel like the truest of all the fights.

We have Yuen Woo Ping to thank for the fight choreography. Sammo Hung didn’t have time in his busy schedule to take on that duty for this film. Although one interviewer did point out that Sammo’s character had died at the end of Ip Man 2, which for some reason would preclude him from being the Action Director on Ip Man 3.

Yuen Woo Ping kept the wire work to a minimum in the four major fights in the film, content to let the martial prowess of his actors be the highlight rather than awkward flying around the set. Granted, it is hard to do a lot of flying when one of your fights is in an elevator.

Donnie Yen was happy to be back working with his old mentor after a twenty-year break. Yen pointed out it was Yuen Woo Ping who gave him his first acting break over thirty years ago.

Yen was the go-between for Tyson and Woo Ping on set, translating each of their ideas for the fights back and forth. Despite being 70, according to Yen, Woo Ping working with Tyson “was like a kid with a whole new set of toys.”

In conclusion, Ip Man is a solid film with a few awkward bits – bits you can overlook in the spectacle of the well-choreographed fight scenes. Deceptively, there is a lot of heart hiding in amongst the bone-breaking.

Up next look for Donnie Yen in the sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and some little film called Star Wars: Rogue One, for which he is very honored to be in. Hopefully they will utilize this action star more than they did Iko Uwais in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll see him some day back in Ip Man 4. There is still the Bruce Lee section of the story to be told. As Donnie Yen said, maybe quoting Sean Connery, “Never say Never.”

As for being called the best fighter on screen today, he responds, “I don’t want to be compared to anybody else. They are all their own species.”