There’s no doubt that Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973) is a cultural movie, and for many kickstarted the whole Karate/Kung-fu movie genre. You could even argue it launched the whole Bruceploitation, and even inspired parodies like Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Shaolin Soccer (2001), Balls of Fury (2007), Black Dynamite (2009), and even video games like the original Mortal Kombat, and many, many more.
The movie had it all, the charismatic Lee, the iconic music and is still, even after 50 odd years, quotable, memorable and watchable.
Enter the Dragon is Bruce Lee’s biggest American movie, and permanently entered Bruce Lee onto the world stage, and is Lee’s final film to feature his direct involvement (later movies would edit, loop sequences from other movies to fake his presence on screen).
The movie is Bruce Lee in front of, and behind the camera; it’s a much a flavour of his martial arts Jeet Kune Do philosophy as it is about Lee’s viewpoints on how to film, do action.
Outside of it’s undoubted inspiration to millions around the world, the movie is about Lee essentially playing a spy trying to take down an evil mastermind who resides on an island where he can’t use guns, and must resort to his own martial arts skills to survive.
Along the way, Lee’s meets John Saxon and Jim Kelly; both bring a sense of unity and friendship.
The movie plays very much like a James Bond movie; and is arguably a remake of Doctor No – with a lot more fighting.
I’d also like to share some critiques I’ve thought the movie.
“The Chinese Superman”
Lee in this movie rarely gets hit, and when he does; it’s a plot point — an example of this is when Lee gets hit to let the evil mastermind, Mr Han, to escape to his hidden bunker.
Lee always presses forward, and he never fights on his backfoot. Although Lee acknowledges himself getting cut, it seems to do nothing, he’s never under pressure, or doesn’t seem to fear much.
There’s a lot of reasons why this might be. My own thought is that during this time Chinese were never seen in this way before.
“The fights are inconsistent”
Lee’s standard is very high and is hard to match. Whereas Lee’s fights were very high quality (for that time), supporting characters lacked the same sharpness. The inconsistency, quality of fight sequences took a piece away from the movie — but that’s probably because Lee set the standard, and its hard to match.
“It should have been Jim Kelly at the end, back to back with Lee”
It’s easy to say now, perhaps at the time it was hard to see the charisma that Jim Kelly brought to the role, and how cool it would have been if it was Kelly standing back to back with Lee at the end of the movie, fighting together. Sadly, it never happened.
Summary
Enter the Dragon is a success, iconic, memorable, quotable, cultural, and launched Bruce Lee and martial art movies to the world; for this, it will remain an important, integral movie to martial art movie watchers.
Overall: 7/10
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If you’re interested – there’s a great documentary by Bey Logan on Youtube on Enter the Dragon Hong Kong Locations (Youtube) which covers a lot of history, locations and background of the movie.