I was a fan of Bruce Lee before I had ever seen one of
his films in full (which wouldn’t have been until my college years). Further, he died before I was born, so the
fact that he had (and I would argue still has) such a cultural impact is
fascinating. Ironically, the first film
of his that I was intrigued by as a youth was Game of Death, the one during the production of which he died. When I saw that brief shot from the trailer
of Lee squaring off against Kareem Abdul Jabar, I was
mesmerized. It had to be a special
effect or a trick shot. The difference
in size between the combatants was mind-bending for me. More than that, it made Jabar into a monster simply by dint of his gargantuan size,
something which was right in my wheelhouse.
Later, when I saw the slow motion
shot of Lee preparing for battle (I want to say from Enter the Dragon), his arms duplicating and flowing into one
another, reminiscent (again, maybe only to me) of Ray Harryhausen’s Kali statue from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, it made the man into the myth in my
eyes. How many pop culture figures can say
that they inspired an entire wave of exploitation films feeding off both their
lives and their legends? I don’t know
that Lee would have appreciated
films like Law Kei’s The Dragon Lives Again (aka Deadly Hands of Kung Fu; incidentally, also
the title of a Marvel Comics magazine that featured martial arts characters
like The Sons of the Tiger and Iron Fist), but you must admit, it would
certainly catch his attention.
Bruce Lee (Bruce Leong aka Siu-Lung
Leung) lies in state before the King of the Underworld (Tang Ching). Upon waking and learning of his situation, Bruce
is shunted off to a local village, where he runs into and makes an enemy of
Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman (Wong Mei). Turns out, Zatoichi is in league with the
Exorcist (Fong Yau, dubbed in
English with a French accent for absolutely no reason), the Godfather (Sin Il-Ryong, who looks more like a Sonny Chiba character than either Vito
or Michael Corleone), Clint Eastwood (Bobby
Canavarro, in Eastwood’s Man
with No Name guise), Dracula (Cheung Hei),
James Bond (Alexander Grand), and
Emmanuelle (Jenny), who want to
usurp power from the King. Joining
forces with the One-Armed Swordsman (Nick
Cheung Lik), Kwai Chang Caine, and Popeye (a very young, fit Eric Tsang), Bruce takes on the
villains and stands up for the rights of the common man. Huzzah!
Bruceploitation is one of the
oddest trends to ever hit celluloid. I
can think of no other personage who inspired an entire exploitation cottage
industry. Sure, there have been
Nazisploitation, Nunsploitation, Blaxploitation, Mexploitation (which is just
exploitation films made in Mexico, not genre films exploiting Mexicans),
Canuxploitation (again…), but there has never been Elvisploitation (for the
most part, and if there has been, it’s an extremely small pool), McQueensploitation,
and so on. Lee’s legacy carried beyond his actual achievements. Many of the Bruceploitation films are either
factually inaccurate biopic/documentaries (a la Chariots of the Gods) or simply cheap Martial Arts films where its star
was given a moniker similar to Lee (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bronson Lee,
ad nauseum) and billed on the poster as the true successor to the genuine
article. The Dragon Lives Again is something altogether different. It’s a pure fantasy that plays with the
legend of Bruce Lee as a symbol.
The film skirts the more unsavory
aspects of the whole Bruceploitation movement (but that someone had this idea
at all is audacious as hell) by dealing with the man as myth. Bruce is first shown with a blanket over his
dead body and sporting a massive erection.
Said tumescence is revealed to actually be Lee’s signature nunchaku, a weapon he keeps on him at all
times. Right off the bat, we get
allusions to Lee’s sexual power and
his skill with nunchucks in one fell swoop.
The two are inseparable. Just
about every character remarks about how sexually powerful Lee is, and the women all want to bed down with him (even the
King’s wife and concubines, who want to “try him out for size”). Once Bruce gets to the village, he becomes a
hero of the people, teaching villagers Jeet Kun Do (let’s just say that’s what
it is), standing up to corrupt policemen, and staving off the machinations of both
the bad guys and the King. Yet, Bruce
isn’t exactly a nice guy. He’s a
conceited braggart who knows just how good he is at what he does. He has posters of himself in his room, for
crying out loud! Conversely, Bruce
realizes that he was flawed when alive.
He states that, “I used to play around just too much,” and even
apologizes to Linda Lee Cadwell (Lee’s widow) directly.
Similarly, the characters Bruce
encounters in the Underworld are myths, cultural icons of the time. That he is thrown in with them asserts that
this is an idealized Bruce, a character of superheroic proportions. Still, Bruce is Bruce, and though he is the
legend, he is also the person (though he’s not really). Even when the other characters use actual
peoples’ names (read: Clint Eastwood),
they are still acting as the character that person made famous. Most surreal in this regard is the appearance
of Kwai Chang Caine, a character reputedly created to be played by Lee on the Kung Fu television show but that wound up being portrayed by David Carradine. Needless to say, Bruce takes potshots at
Caine throughout the film, and the floppy-hatted, wandering warrior-philosopher
takes it all with a sheepish grin, knowing his place before the true
master. Further, Bruce himself appears
in the film in the guise of Kato, the sidekick character he played on The Green Hornet. Why?
Why the hell not?! The point is
that Bruce is simultaneously the most iconic and the most real of all the
legends of the world in this film. While
he’s still a cartoon portrayal of the man, Bruce is less of one than everyone
else here. The sole exception to this is
the villagers, and even they are playing the roles laid down in every Kung Fu
movie ever made; even they are cultural reference points.
You can’t really judge this film
based on its story (it doesn’t really have one that it cares enough to follow,
and what is there is standard for its base genre), its acting, its success as a
comedy (it isn’t, or at least, not intentionally), or even its fight
choreography (which is passable but unremarkable). Instead, The
Dragon Lives Again should be judged on how far it’s willing to go, on how
imaginative the producers were willing to get with their premise. For example, whenever Bruce squares off
against one of the villains, they suddenly all appear in a rock quarry, and the
film essentially becomes one shade away from a Japanese Tokusatsu effort. The film pushes every limit it has (budget,
scope, taste, you name it), and though it’s ultimately a wildly hot mess, it’s
still wild, and, I would argue, one of the most unique films ever made to cash
in on a pop culture icon.
MVT: The size of the balls
it took to make this film.
Make or Break: The opening
credits where Bruce spars with each of the fantastical characters he’s about to
meet in the film. This itself is a
common trope in the Martial Arts genre, but it’s somehow more insane in this instance.
Score: 7/10
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