In Way of the Dragon, Bruce Lee stars as Tang Lung, a Chinese martial artist and country boy who arrives in Rome to help his cousins out with their restaurant business. A local syndicate is pressuring the family to sell by issuing threats and scaring away customers, until the conflict eventually escalates and Tang Lung is forced to kick around the lower tier enforcers. The gang boss is informed of the problem and he decides to get rid of Tang Lung by any means necessary, be it with more gangsters, a sniper assassin or international martial artists-- including a young, quite hairy, Chuck Norris.
This 1972 pic has the distinction of being Bruce Lee’s last complete Hong Kong film and his only opportunity in the director’s seat. As a result, he seems to be given much more creative freedom, but at the cost of a fluid, well constructed plot.
The story takes a personal direction for him, dealing with the Chinese immigrant experience in the West, and this makes for some awkward filler in the first act of the film. For every funny moment—like the old woman staring at Lee in the uncomfortably long first scene—there are strange ones that do not quite work. Lee can successfully compromise his persona to play a comically naïve newcomer, but the humor is never strong enough to justify it. All the viewer can do is wait for the action.
And when that happens, all is well. The fights are excellent as usual, and they build to get better and better as the film continues. Lee takes on groups of gangsters, including some with firearms, and this appears to be a nice element of realism. However, the film never takes advantage of tense, real threats. Even when Lee’s friends are held captive at gunpoint, he can somehow dispatch the enemies from across the room before they do anything. The gangsters always pretend to mean business, but the plot never gives them the chance to prove it.
Still, Dragon is a great deal of fun to watch in any case for its star. His one-on-one fights with Bob Wall (Oharra from Enter the Dragon) and Chuck Norris are both classic moments, especially the latter, where Lee appropriates the Colosseum to assert the dominance of Eastern combat and his own martial arts mantra. Lee is able to evolve and develop his fighting on-screen by adapting to his opponent’s style and it remains a remarkable influence on action films to this day.
While the pic certainly has its problems, it’s still a Bruce Lee film, and that’s all that truly matters. Sadly, this is the closest viewers will get to seeing Lee’s true cinematic visions realized. One can only imagine where he might have taken the genre if he had the opportunity.
Reviewed by Tarun
