REVIEW:
Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story was the first semi-biopic to cover the life and death of Bruce Lee. Its a highly fictionalized account that gets many of the facts wrong and aside from a few exceptions, manages to trample over Lee's memory without being even marginally entertaining.

You know the filmmakers were using their imaginations rather than research when the film opens to Lee delivering "Washington Post" newspapers, while he was supposed to be living in the state of Washington, not the capitol. The film skips over his education at the University of Washington and shows him participating in a competition through a series of sloppily edited montages. While with some of his students from the "gung fu" school he's opened, he's asked to join the cast of the Green Hornet. His happy marriage to Linda and the birth of his two children are glossed over and he decides that he's unhappy living in the United States, especially since random Japanese thugs continue to challenge him?! Lee flies to Hong Kong, but returns home after getting a lame offer from Run Run Shaw to work for Shaw Brothers. The wife of director Lo Lieh (it was actually the wife of Raymond Chow, Golden Harvest's chairman) convinces Lee to sign a contract and he begins work on his first film.

Aside from some really bad directing, acting, and voice acting, the film has been a marginal facsimile of Lee's life. But at this point the story shifts to a supposed love affair he had with Betty Ting Pei and completely loses its footing. While this reviewer does appreciate the way in which Lo Wei is portrayed as a real jackass, which from all accounts is true, a decision to spice up the story with a sordid love triangle between Lee, Betty Ting Pei, and Nora Miao (Lee's co-star in Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon) kills the film.

Its really impossible for anyone to capture Lee's intensity and charisma and Bruce Li doesn't even seem to be trying in this film. Then to have Lee's remaining life reduced to revolving around a love affair with Ting Pei, played by an actress who really hams it up, Li becomes nothing more than a supporting cast member in the movie he's supposed to be starring in as one of the most fascinating personalities of the 20th century. Instead of seeing how Lee fought for respect in Hollywood and worked to show his philosophy in his films, we're treated to Lee shown as an indecisive young man who has abandoned his family to cater to the whims of a spoiled film starlet. This film is the tabloid version that magnifies the rumors and ignores the facts. Yet the worst was to come when Ting Pei herself starred in an even less flattering exploitation piece entitled Bruce Lee and I in 1976 that dealt with the same affair.

Although this is a hideous film on many levels, the action is fairly decent, if sporadic. Li is probably the best of the Lee clones and his martial arts skills were actually impressive. Li doesn't make a huge effort to replicate Lee's moves, but physically, he does a better job than Jason Lee who portrayed Bruce in the overall best biopic to date, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993). Its actually a shame that the filmmakers had not taken their subject matter more seriously since Li could have done a much better job if given the chance.

This film really isn't for anyone except Bruce Li fans or anyone fascinated by the exploitive world of Bruce Lee knockoffs. While it at least does not try to pass off Li as a clone of the real Bruce which lesser films attempted, it does degrade his life by playing loose with the facts. Did Lee ever have an affair? I don't have an answer, but I do know he wasn't the near lifeless husk of a man who appears in this near lifeless husk of a film.

Bruce Li doesn't look like Bruce Lee. He doesn't have the muscles Bruce had, and sure as hell doesn't have the talent. They could have cast former Monkee Mickey Dolenz as Bruce and had a more believable imitator on their hands.

The basic plot of this film revolves around Bruce's desire to leave Hollywood and his white woman behind, return to Hong Kong, get a nice Chinese girl, and settle down to a traditional Chinese life. Somehow, I don't think so. Betty Ting Pei is portrayed as a sweet and loving woman whom only wanted what was best for Bruce. And all this time we thought she was a sluttish gangster-groupie drug addict who only had a career because of her harpyish addiction to famous men. Oh well, to her credit, in many of the films she would later make, she got naked.

This film is filled with nail-biting boredom, horrible fights scenes, and factual inaccuracies so utterly absurd that the whole thing crosses over from purely tasteless, boring drivel and becomes an insult.

This film relishes everything that was sordid and seedy about Lee's life, making it the mirror opposite of the similarly named Hollywood version of Bruce's life. Someday, someone will tell his story accurately, and you'll have a moving, powerful portrait of a flawed but ultimately heroic human being.

Until then, we have utter garbage like this three-day old trash. Bruce Li is at his worst here. We know he can be a decent actor and martial artist when he tried, but this movie is just plain awful. If this was how Bruce Li paid tribute to "his master," then Lee's ghost must be out gunning for revenge.

That in itself would be an interesting movie. Bruce Lee's ghost comes back to beat the shit out of Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Brute Lee, and all the other lame-ass wannabes who cashed in on his name, life, and death. And maybe, if we're lucky, he'll beat the shit out of David Carradine as well ... just for good measure, of course.