Enter the Dragon
dir. Clouse
Opens Fri April 9
Clinton Street Theater
The irony of Bruce Lee is that his films are always awesome because he’s in them–and they always suffer for the same reason. It’s not that he does anything wrong; Lee is, and will likely always remain, the king of kung fu films. It’s just that … he’s Bruce Lee. Lee’s reputation has its downside; it precedes him so fully that it’s difficult to see him as anything but a simultaneous embodiment and parody of all things kung fu.
1973’s Enter the Dragon has a similar reputation, and is cursed with the same flaws. As the most famous kung fu movie ever, starring the most famous kung fu star ever, Dragon is unavoidably over-hyped–yet even with that going against it, it’s still one hell of a movie.
Lee breaks from his usual role of “young kung fu student out for revenge” to play Lee, a young kung fu student out for revenge. When Lee’s master informs him of a martial arts tournament being held on (where else?) an island fortress, Lee discovers that the tournament’s mastermind is Han (Kien Shih), a disgraced student of the Shaolin school… and the man responsible for Lee’s sister’s death! (As the rules of kung fu films dictate that anyone who’s either disgraced Shaolin or harmed a family member must be killed, you can imagine how doubly pissed Lee is.) Throw in Jim “Dragon” Kelley and John Saxon, and the rest is pretty self-explanatory: Lee kicks some serious ass, whooping and screeching all the way.
There’s so much right with Enter the Dragon–a great cast, Lee’s vaguely sinister charm, some insane fight scenes (choreographed by Lee), and just the right amount of cheesy direction from Robert Clouse–that it’s easy to overlook the film’s uneven pacing, the fact that Saxon clearly can’t fight worth shit, and a weird sense of speciousness (likely present because Dragon was the first American-produced martial arts epic). Dragon is one of those rare films where its weaknesses are also its strengths, and that–again with the irony–makes it such an undeniably strong and entertaining film.
