Lee plays Brandon Ma, a regular guy working in Hong Kong, who is set up by his drug-dealing best friend Michael (Michael Wong, "Knock Off", "Enter the Eagles"), to take the rap for the murder of an undercover cop. Michael also has eyes for Brandon's girl, May (Regina Kent). While Brandon languishes in jail, May gives birth to their child and flees to Brazil to avoid the lurid clutches of Michael, who has become a big crime boss. Brandon gets out of prison after eight years, learns the truth, and goes after Michael for revenge.

Brandon Lee's riveting presence and raw intensity make this film a rare treat. The action is explosive, akin to John Woo's Hollywood action epics. Definitely a must-see for Brandon Lee fans.

Yawn... oh, I'm sorry, I must have dozed off while watching this clunker. I'm beginning to think that the one Brandon Lee movie I like (Rapid Fire) is a fluke. Simply put, they don't come much worse than this. The plot is stale with a horrible, by-the-numbers script. Both Lee and Wong are (or, in Lee's case, were) not native Cantonese speakers and it shows. I think if you look up "mook jung" (a Chinese phrase meaning "dead wood" used to call someone stupid) in a dictionary, you would see a picture of the two "actors" in this movie. Watching Lee and Wong (long known as one of the worst actors in HK cinema) try to interact with each other is literally painful. Did I mention that Lee and Wong use their real first names in the movie so they would know when they are being spoken to? Agh. The filmmakers should have saved us a whole lot of trouble and just let them speak in English so we wouldn't have to sit through this slow torture. Then again, neither Lee nor Wong are/were that great in English-speaking roles either.

You might ask why am I spending so much time bitching about the acting in an action film. Well, for a supposed action film, there's very little of it. Most of the movie meanders around, at times trying to be a serious crime/prison drama in the vein of Ringo Lam's On Fire series. Which might have worked if Lee could act, but... anyway, the fights (supposedly because of Lee's lack of talent in that area as well) are so short they're barely noticeable. In one scene, Lee beats up Triad enforcer Bolo Yeung in about 10 seconds. I don't think any of the "fights" last longer than that. Mostly it's just Lee giving a tough look, two or three blows and that's it. Back to another ten or fifteen minutes of boring exposition, another mini-fight, and so on. There is a fairly vibrant shootout near the end, but by that point, it's too little, too late.

Unless you're really (and I mean really) curious to see Brandon Lee in a HK movie, avoid this one. It makes most of Cynthia Rothrock's cheesy US B-movies look like Shakespeare by comparison.

Brandon plays a guy who is framed for a murder,and sentenced to a long term in prison. When he finds out he was double crossed by his best friend, he sets out a plan for revenge. With his partner, played by Meng Hoi, who did the choreography, he sets out on a bloody and tragic mission of vengeance.

The story is very formulaic, but the action is well done, relying on furious gunplay rather than martial arts, and is very reminiscent of the best of John Woo. Brandon handles his role well and at times reminds you of his father, especially in his short duel with Bolo Yueng. Again it shows you just how tragic his early death was, and just like his father he was just on the verge of superstardom.

If you are expecting a retread of the Bruce Lee movies of old then forget it, but if you want a good story and some exceptional action scenes then see this film, you will not regret it.

Legacy of Rage is a fairly good vehicle for the scion of the Dragon. Brandon knows that he does not have the martial arts skill of his father, and so he goes a completely different route. However, those of you looking for Bruce Lee connections will be amused by the thug Brandon takes on the alley behind the restaurant: Strongman Bolo Yeung, who was one of Bruce Lee's unforgettable adversaries in Enter the Dragon. But this historic fight is cut short by the arrival of the local police. Rather, the real action comes in the final reel when Brandon gets his hands on a whole lot of guns.

The final gunfight makes it all worthwhile. Brandon and his partner raise all kinds of heck with submachine guns and shotguns. If you liked the gunfights in the Antonio Banderas film Desperado, you might be interested to see this movie, because director Robert Rodrigues seems to have lifted large portions of the bar room gun fight from Legacy of Rage.

Michael Wong clocks an impressive performance as a bad guy. Despite the fact that he looks like the results of an immoral genetic experiment involving DNA from Chow Yun Fat and Rob Lowe, he manages to portray evil without going overboard. Shing Fu shows up as Michael's chief henchman, but then again, Shing Fu is the bad guy in nearly every film that comes out of Hong Kong.

We would like to leave you with a quote from the movie. As you know, most HK films we see are translated form the original Chinese language versions, and some of the translations tend to be a little, how shall we say, wonky. In this film, Brandon is informed by a police officer that he is going to jail, and that he's lucky to get off with as light a sentence as he did. As he leaves the interrogation room where Brandon is being held he says, "Sonny, you're going to spend a long time in jail. Have a banana." We think that says it all.