The Way of the Dragon
Bruce Lee’s career was short but iconic, with The Way of the Dragon standing out for its broad cultural impact across a multitude of dimensions. Unfortunately, the movie does not hold up all that well. Its grounded choreography, humorous and playful attitude, and European setting (as well as the accompanying heavy use of English) were all groundbreaking for kung fu films of its time, helping establish Bruce Lee as a star and grow interest in Hong Kong cinema worldwide. Yet, its dated aesthetic, odd pacing, and paper-thin storytelling make the movie less enjoyable to a modern viewer who is watching it as it is, without all that contemporary context.
The action in The Way of the Dragon is iconic, make no mistake. However, it suffers from The Godfather problem, where the movie was so influential on so many films and filmmakers that the action scenes themselves have had their impact reduced by their outsized and ongoing relevance in pop culture. If you haven’t seen the fights themselves, you have seen them parodied, imitated, and pastiched to the point that they will essentially feel like you’ve seen them even if you haven’t. In this sense, The Way of the Dragon suffers from its own success: as its greatest strength becomes a weakness to modern audiences that may perceive its fight choreography as tired and cliche even though it originated those concepts.
The rest of the movie, in between those iconic fight scenes, is, frankly, not very good. For starters, The Way of the Dragon is intensely of its time. This movie is about as early 70s as an avocado green refrigerator. The interior design, costuming, haircuts, fashion accessories, and so much more, don’t feel lived in and real but more pulled straight from that months Cosmopolitan or GQ magazines. It isn’t just the design that feels dated, though. The soundtrack feels straight out of a 1960s television comedy, sounding more like the background music to an episode of Leave It To Beaver than a slick action feature a la Bullitt. Similarly, the camerawork and editing is very much of its time and place as well, as the gratuitous use of crash zooms and numerous closeups of eyes serve as a reminder.
It is also the pacing, which is awkward and slow. Very little happens in the beginning of the movie. It isn’t just that no one fights, its that nothing happens really at all. Lee eats some soup and encounters some casual racism, gets a ride from the airport, doesn’t know how to carry a conversation with his host, and that’s about it. It gives some small clues on character, but not any that matter to the plot, and does nothing to provide exposition other than establishing the restaurant’s trouble with interfering thugs.
The ending has its issues too. The climatic fight is excellent, but it is accompanied by a twist in the story that comes out of nowhere, serves no purpose to the story, and gets resolved almost immediately with no real payoff. It takes a lighthearted tale and suddenly nosedives it in a darker direction in a totally unnecessary way. This is somewhat fitting for the time, as “realistically sad” endings were en vogue in the 70s, but it so comes out of left field that it feels out of place even if you prefer this era’s rejection of the “Hollywood” ending.
On the topic of the script, a subtle thing that hurts the movie overall is a pervasive pro-Chinese nationalism that can border on feeling propagandistic. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it seems to me that sub-textually, deep at its core, this movie is about a handsome Chinese action star showing the superiority of the Chinese people in a variety of ways. This is most notable in its anti-Japanese sentiments. Not unsurprisingly, given China’s oppression under Japan during World War II, this movie uses karate’s supposed inferiority to kung fu to make a broader point about China’s position visa vi Japan. When Lee arrives in Italy, the Chinese chefs and waitstaff are all practicing karate; demonstrating a learned inferiority complex. Lee shows them the value of traditional kung fu and they abandon the pursuit. Later, it is an important plot point that Lee beats not one, not two, but three karate masters, essentially in a row, completely cementing the superiority of kung fu and the Chinese way. The biggest irony here, of course, is that Bruce Lee’s own philosophy and personal fighting style (Jeet Kune Do) believed the opposite: that martial arts shouldn’t be about superior or inferior fighting styles but rather about finding and taking what works from all different styles and combining them to make something new, effective, and adapted to the style and preference of the practitioner.
All that being said, the influence of The Way of the Dragon can be a draw in and of itself for a certain kind of viewer. If you are a deep aficionado of martial arts movies, or a huge fan of Bruce Lee outside of acting, there is value in watching this movie just for what it represents. Which, incidentally, extends beyond just the fight choreography. One interesting thing about the movie, from a film history perspective, is the attempts by Lee to show more personality and bring a certain degree of silliness and fun to his part. As I understand it, the conventional kung fu hero of then Hong Kong cinema was exclusively stoic and/or serious martial arts practitioners. The characters were famous folk heroes or monks of various schools of spiritualism and so commanded a certain respect from the Chinese filmmakers and their audiences. Even Lee’s previous efforts, such as The Big Boss, feature a serious protagonist. The Way of the Dragon softens this formula, with Lee’s character being a goofy country boy, allowing for more comedy, both during the action and between it, than before. This likely laid the foundations that would eventually lead to action comedy as a important piece of the Hong Kong cinema tradition with the likes of Jackie Chan and Sammy Hung, especially given that their early careers overlapped with Lee’s on films such as Enter the Dragon and Fist of Fury.
The Way of the Dragon is not a very fun movie, unfortunately. It’s best feature, the fight scenes, are so famous and so influential that they can feel tired and cliche. Everything else is either hopelessly dated or just bad. The result is something that doesn’t deliver what you would expect from the movie that established Bruce Lee as an international superstar, took Hong Kong cinema mainstream, inspired a generation of martial arts enthusiasts and professional fighters, and redefined the action genre both in China and beyond. It is all of those things, it just doesn’t hold up for a modern audience.
Would Recommend: If you are a lover of all things martial arts.
Would Not Recommend: If you can’t stand when a movie feels visually and stylistically dated.