Enter the Dragon (1973)
Directed by Robert Clouse
Written by Michael Allin
Starring Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly
Release Date August 19th, 1973
Published August 19th, 1973
This week’s classic on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is Enter the Dragon, the final film in the all too short career of the legendary Bruce Lee. I have had little exposure to kung fu movies in my nearly 20 years as a film critic. Aside from some 80s cheese like The Last Dragon or the work of Jackie Chan, I have mostly ignored the genre having written it off based mostly on the stereotypes built from years of Bruce Lee knock-offs and cash-ins that soured more than just me on the idea of kung fu movies as anything other than the sad side of the B-movie genre.
Watching Enter the Dragon for the first time sadly is no revelation for me. While I came away with a great deal of respect for why fans took so much to Bruce Lee as a performer, I found the film not all that special. Lee’s magnetism goes a long way to making the otherwise predictable, bordering on silly story worth watching but the screen time spent waiting for Lee to start kicking butt is quite tedious and I found myself drifting.
In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee stars as a martial arts master, also named Lee, who is recruited by a shady intelligence organization to attend a martial arts tournament run by the kind of super-villain that only exists in martial arts movies, Mr. Han played by former Drunken Master star Shih Kien. Mr. Han owns his own island in the Pacific and despite the best efforts of this intelligence agency they aren’t sure if he is amassing weapons or not.
The agency needs Lee to participate in a deadly martial arts tournament hosted by Han on his island and find out if there are indeed illegal weapons that would allow international military to attack the island. Lee agrees to the mission and then finds out that the mission has a personal component for him. We meet Lee’s father and he informs Lee and us that Lee’s sister was murdered by Han’s thugs in a seemingly random killing.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
