Released posthumously after Bruce Lee’s untimely death at 32, ENTER THE DRAGON is an American and Hong Kong co-production that canonizes Lee’s screen immortality, patterning after the au courant James Bond template, it whisks Lee, a Shaolin martial artist, under the aegis of British Intelligence Service to an offshore island in Hong Kong, where supervillain Han (Shih), a former Shaolin practitioner, governs as a one-man empire, ostensibly for martial art training, a cover for his backdoor operation of drug trafficking and a prostitution ring.
Han arranges a martial art tournament every three years (an activity seemingly nonsensical as it only courts unwanted extraneous attention, whose justification Michael Allin’s vapid script half-asses), so here are some prominent participants, besides Lee, there is Roper (Saxon), a hardened gambler, who functions as a Caucasian moral yardstick (whose libidinous proclivity is also strictly Caucasian) and the Afro-sporting Williams (Kelly), who is bumptious, debauched and has to get his lumps in a hard way, together they will face Hen’s trained henchmen, lead by O’Hara (Wall), who happens to be answerable for the death of Lee’s sister Su Lin (Mao), and a burly goon Bolo (Yeung).
After a prologue in Shaolin Temple where Lee elucidates his tenet of “emotional content” in martial arts, and the panoply of Hong Kong’s erstwhile ghettos-on-the-sea, the rest of the film sticks to the derivative plot-line slavishly, festooned by an oriental menagerie that has no aesthetic moderation, but when Lee finally acts up, the movie whirls towards a rapturous experience, his “fight without fight” movements, so fiercely accurate, physically engaged, that their dramatic impact is never authenticated by the battered opponents, but Lee himself, straining his wiry, flexed body and uttering his trademark screech, all condensed in a severity that is awe-inspiring, there is no room for hesitation or weakness, Lee is the real deal, he means business, although he hardly takes a hit (a major contrast to Jackie Chan’s comic-inflected choreography, who appears several times as bit players, can you spot him?), crimson gushes across his torso only stir his mettle during the climatic smackdown, where a hall of mirrors becomes the time-honored, visual shorthand of breaking the illusory distractions and going for the jugular, yes, it is all kitschy (Schifrin’s jazz-fusion score included), but Lee is sui generis, indomitable, indelible and the last person on earth one wants to mess with.
referential entries: Terence Young’s DR. NO (1962, 6.4/10); King Hu’s DRAGON INN (1967, 7.6/10).
