Movie Review Birth of the Dragon

Birth of the Dragon (2017) 

Directed by George Nolfi 

Written by Christopher Wilkinson, Stephen J. Rivele 

Starring Phillip Wan-tung Ng, Xia Yu, Jin Xing, Billy Magnusson 

Release Date August 25th, 2017 

Published August 24th, 2017

Birth of the Dragon has been marketed as the story of Bruce Lee learning to grow and become more disciplined, humble, and dedicated to his craft after being confronted by a famed Shaolin Master named Wong Jack Man. Instead, Birth of the Dragon is a ludicrously misguided combination of faux-history and one of the worst conceived Bruce Lee movies in history. It's as bad as the films that inserted old Bruce Lee footage after his death into different movies that were then marketed as Bruce Lee movies.

Birth of the Dragon was directed by George Nolfi who acquits himself well as a visual stylist but as a writer he fails to understand why this movie should not have been made in the first place. The story is based off an ungodly awful, mostly apocryphal story in a 1980 Kung Fu magazine. The writer of that story brings together three separate accounts of a fight between Bruce Lee and Wong Jack Man and it is written in a style that is reminiscent of the worst of modern internet writing. Supposed professional writers dedicate themselves to writing about information in other people’s articles, stealing without stealing what others wrote as if by stealing from multiple other sources you’ve somehow written your own article.

That is not exactly the best place to begin an artistic endeavor but then things get so much worse from there. The idea is supposed to be about this legendary 1964 fight between two Kung Fu masters that forever changed how Bruce Lee used Kung Fu, creating his legendary Jeet Kune Do style. However, because the writers, director, producers, and distributors apparently felt that mass audiences wouldn’t take to a story about Asian Americans, even if one of them is portraying BRUCE LEE(!!!!!!) we get an entirely invented character named Steve McKee who is so terribly portrayed by Billy Magnusson that I genuinely felt sorry for the young man that this performance is preserved on screen.

Magnusson is awful because his role is so incredibly stock and was built solely for the purpose of creating a character that dumb white audiences could relate to. This is the kind of quietly insidious racial politicking that we as critics and audiences have been allowing Hollywood to get away with for far too long and frankly, I am done. I recently wrote about a wonderful film called Wind River which shone a different kind of light on this type of casting. That film cast white movie stars because it had an urgent cry of a story to tell and needed to use white movie stars as a megaphone for an important purpose. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Ali

Ali (2001) 

Directed by Michael Mann 

Written by Eric Roth, Michael Mann, Christopher Wilkinson 

Starring Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Jon Voight, Mario Van Peebles, Ron Silver, Jeffrey Wright 

Release Date December 25th, 2001 

Published April 15th, 2002 

The life of Mohammed Ali is one of the most fascinating ever lived, a life that should be dramatized for the big screen and make for a great film. 

Unfortunately, this is not that film. 

The film covers a ten-year span of Ali's life from his victory over Sonny Liston in 1964 to his dramatic victory over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Michael Mann gives us a feel of Ali's personal life, his battle with his father over his conversion to Islam, his relationships with his wives and his relationship with Malcolm X. However all of these scenes feel disjointed. Director Michael Mann seems to keep the audience at a distance instead of allowing us into the mind of Ali. With dialogue, Mann uses the film's soundtrack of 60's R & B tunes to deliver the emotion and at times even replace actual dialogue. 

It's likely that Mann knows many of us are already quite familiar with Ali's many public challenges and doesn't feel the need to go into much detail. But why then does he muddle the timeline of the champ's career? If Mann believed the audience to be overly familiar with Ali's story, why does he leave out important moments of the champ's career such as the infamous phantom punch in the second Liston fight and his two rematches with Joe Frazier? 

The boxing scenes in Ali are quite good with Mann getting in the ring with a handheld camera and putting the audience right in the match. The camerawork in the boxing scenes is phenomenal and star Will Smith is surprisingly credible, trading punches with real boxers including former middleweight champion James Toney who plays Smokin' Joe.

As for Will Smith he's very good, not quite Oscar good in my opinion but good. Smith evokes many of Ali's most recognizable attributes such as his brashness and vocal cadence. He also handles the emotional elements very well, especially the difficulties in Ali's personal life. Unfortunately, Smith is let down by director Mann who forgoes Smith's dialogue in favor the film's soundtrack as I described earlier.