Film Review: Way of the Dragon

When I was in Middle School, I discovered Hong Kong martial arts films through researching the wuxia genre on the Internet after watching Big Trouble in Little China, and the first I sought out was Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss. So, I’ve always known that Bruce was one of cinema’s greatest film performers, and I’d assumed he could do no wrong. That there was no such thing as a mediocre Bruce Lee film. It turns out there is, and it’s called Way of the Dragon.

By all rights, Way of the Dragon should be legendary. It’s the film where Bruce fights Chuck Norris, right? Yeah, it is. It’s also the first film Bruce wrote and directed, and it’s supposed to be a comedy. It is at this point where keen-eyed readers will notice the phrase “supposed to be” and go “uh oh”, because there are few things worse than an unfunny comedy.

The premise is pretty basic – Bruce Lee plays a guy from Hong Kong who comes to Rome to help out some relatives who are in trouble with the Mob. It seems pretty straightforward where it’s going from here.

The film, very briefly, starts on the right foot. We see Bruce at an airport in Rome, where he’s waiting for his ride because his flight landed early, and finds himself increasingly growing uncomfortable with the death glare he’s receiving from a probably racist little old lady. So, then he decides to go to a restaurant, where he can’t read the menu and ends up ordering a lot of soups that he gamely eats. “Ah,” you think, “Bruce Lee is taking the piss out of his image.”

Funny you should choose that word. Because from that point onward, any humor around Bruce is entirely around him having to pee a lot. It’s not even done in a “has to wait outside the bathroom squirming” kind of way. He’s just not present in scenes because he’s peeing. The rest of the humor comes from the quisling Chinese person who is working for the local mob boss (who also played the quisling Chinese person in Fist of Fury). This character is so camp gay, his dub voice should have a lisp – that’s not a compliment. Other than that, there are two jokes I noticed – one is in a fight scene, Bruce switches from two nunchucks to one, and a mook tries to use the discarded pair, only to knock himself out. In the other, after Bruce and the employees of the Chinese Restaurant show up at the Mob boss’s office and rough up all his goons, leaving the boss to speechlessly indicate to the quisling that he would like his cigar lit, as his hand shakes.

Otherwise, every other joke falls into 2 categories: recognizable as a joke but not funny, or not recognizable as a joke. In all, it makes the comedy parts of the movie tremendously onerous.

But what about the fights? Well, the good news is that the fight choreography is excellent and has the level of excitement and general thrill to it that all of Bruce’s other films have. On the other hand, if you’re expecting physical comedy in these fight scenes, you’ll be badly disappointed. Bruce Lee is not Jackie Chan. He is not Sammo Hung (who was acting and choreographing movies at this point).

It feels like someone at Golden Harvest needed to just sit Bruce Lee down with some Buster Keaton films, or with Chaplin (particularly Modern Times), so he’d understand how physical comedy works. Instead, it almost feels like this film draws all of Bruce Lee’s weaknesses as an artist to the fore. When he wants to elaborate on the philosophy of martial arts and to convey it through film, he’s tremendously talented. However, anything that really depends on him quashing his own ego, deflating his even then mythological image, and making him more human, he’s just not good at.

I’m reminded of one of The Rock’s early films – The Rundown. In that film, Rock, Sean William Scott, and Rosario Dawson are in the Amazon River. Dawson’s character warns Rock and Scott against peeing into the water because of the risk of Kandiru fish swimming up their urethra, which can only be removed by cutting off their dick. At this, Rock and Scott freak out. Bruce Lee doesn’t feel like he, as an actor, is comfortable showing enough vulnerability to freak out over a Kandiru fish, never mind having to wait for the bathroom.

In all, Way of the Dragon was a big disappointment. I liked the fight scenes, but honestly, I’m much more likely to rewatch the rest of Bruce’s filmography.

Way of the Dragon is available as part of the Bruce Lee Criterion Collection boxed set (Affiliate Link).