Runtime: 100 minutes
Directed by: Bruce Lee
Starring: Lee, Nora Miao, Ping-Ou Wei, Chung-Hsin Huang, Chuck Norris
From: Golden Harvest
As me paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee’s death… I should have revisited Enter the Dragon instead. Surprisingly, I never saw much on the Internet concerning Lee passing away on July 20, 1973. As stated before, it is weird how Bruce and his son Brandon died young due to unusual circumstances—yet there is no curse in that bloodline nor do I believe the Triads murdered the former. Bruce died from an allergic reaction that made his brain swell; although, after the fact there are rumors that there also was heat stroke or an illness caused by a lack of sodium.
In any event, there is regret that I can’t give rave reviews to the only full movie Lee directed on such a big anniversary of a legendary figure that’s reached mythical status due to the incredible feats he did or was said to have done… lying about my opinions would be worse so honesty has to win today. This is far from the most blasphemous film-related comment I’ve made just on Letterboxd, but the incredible lengthy finale between Lee and Chuck Norris is the one highlight the film offers and that can be found on YouTube.
Otherwise, it’s a basic story although that is acceptable when it sounds like a bread-and-butter formula of “Lee goes to Rome, Italy as family run a Chinese restaurant there but they refuse to capitulate to a “crime boss” (i.e. The Mob) so Bruce kicks all their asses” but yikes does this have problems. The action and characters are fine, although neither is as good as Enter the Dragon or Fist of Fury. What greatly hampers the movie is the “comedy”; this has plenty of that and much of it was just bad to me. After all, an important trait of our hero is that he either has bladder control problems or is incontinent as he uses the bathroom frequently! This is the type of “humor” the viewer is subjected to. The score is best described as “seems like it was borrowed from a Carry On movie”.
I honestly could not believe how turned off I was by that, or how painful the first act was as it was full of “comedy” and constructing the plot/characters… not to mention how it was awful on the technical side; that’s editing, camera placement, pacing, usage of stock footage, etc. The laughs we get from many Jackie Chan pictures, this was not. No kidding, this opening act even features the Sad Trombone “wah wah, wah wahhhhh” sound effect! Let’s not even discuss how an extra in this film is someone I had never even heard of until Wikipedia last night, but I know that John Derbyshire is an old dude who is in journalism, has written about computers/mathematics, has won awards... and is also a WHITE SUPREMACIST. I can’t blame the movie for that as this revelation came 40 years after The Way of the Dragon was released.
In any case, it’s a tragedy that Bruce Lee passed away so young; he left us only a tiny body of work so there isn’t much for me to see that hasn’t been written about on Letterboxd before. I’d have been better off watching Enter the Dragon again and only posting something short about it now as what I originally wrote a few years ago I’m still satisfied with.
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