Fun filler!

Like The Dragon Lives (a.k.a. He's A Legend, He's A Hero), Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (a.k.a. Bruce Lee: The True Story) shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Did any of you honestly think this was going to be a true representation of Bruce Lee's life?!...and that it starred Bruce as well??!!....all I can say is that you should do a little research as to the films Bruce did. Besides an appearance in Marlowe and being fight choreographer for films like John Wayne's Green Berets, the films he did as an action star were The Big Boss, Fist Of Fury, The Way Of The Dragon, Enter The Dragon and Game Of Death - anything else is just shameless exploitative junk....though admittedly good junk at that!

The film practically steers away from his life as a father and husband, so whilst Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story would win out in that regard, the latter is just simply an expensive version of the Bruceploitation movies made in a bygone age (as Bruce Thomas {member of Elvis Costello's band} rightfully so pointed out and argued in his book Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit).

It provides good hokey comedy value and whilst the film isn't a comedy laughathon riot like Dragon Lives, it still has its fair share of comic moments like the old man Bruce meets at the car wash and the scenes where we see Bruce in his training room (which resembles a laboratory than an exercise facility and certainly nothing like Bruce had ever worked out in...and at point it even resembles a medieval weaponary chamber/S&M-esque room)!

Whilst there is some basis in reality in that Bruce had done weight training, jogged and did electro-shock therapy; I doubt Bruce performed a contemporary/post-modern version of the training Jimmy Wang Yu's character anticipated in for the film The Chinese Boxer i.e. dipping your hands onto a hot substance (in Jimmy's case, it's iron and in Bruce's case it's some kind of stereotypical foaming-at-the-seams laboratory chemical basin).

What did it for me (humour wise) was when it depicts Lee punching into these increasingly smaller holes in a giant mechanical device that beeps and lights up these varied coloured bulbs as it registers the force of his hits - it foreshadows a similar scene in Dragon Lives.

Come to think of it, the only scene that's portrayed with the most accuracy is Bruce's death scene as Betty Ting Pei, Raymond Chow and her respective doctor try to wake up Bruce before calling an ambulance to take him to the Queen Elizabeth hospital. In fact with all the moments of inaccuracy and conjecture that drown the film, it's a wonder that they even bothered to find out that Bruce had been selling his script of The Silent Flute to Hollywood film moguls. Astonishingly, they were even spot on with the original idea for Game Of Death where Bruce was to fight 7 martial arts champs!: www.cityonfire.com/features/bobwall

The dubbing was very different than all the usual Kung Fu movies because the recording sessions were done in America.

In some ways this film is similar to 'Exit The Dragon, Enter The Tiger' in that not only is the dubbing more unique & better but the soundtrack is composed with more originality than usual and with better choice of tracks (again, one cue from a 007 flick), though it frankly doesn't compare to the brilliant soundtrack that permeated Bruce Li's other flick. However, the war cries used for both Bruce and his assailants is laughable and in some occasions badly synched. Other similarities are the high production values as the film was shot in Seattle, San Francisco, Long Beach, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Rome (they actually did location shooting in the colosseum). Of further note is the feel of a Western feature as there are lots of caucasian actors and it's pretty clear that a lot of the dialogue scenes were originally shot in English.

Of course, it's the fight scenes which sell the picture as they are neatly choreographed with a very tight feel to them with little sense of rehearsal (something which reflects Bruce Lee's philosophy of realistic fights not being rehearsed routines) thus the fight scenes have a natural feel to them.

As you can imagine from the geographical scope of the story, there's a welcome mixture of styles such as Karate, Thai boxing, traditional Kung Fu and Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do (the stylized version anyway).

Speaking of scope, the film has a pool of talented faces and we even get cameos from people who appeared in Bruce Lee's Big Boss and Way Of The Dragon.

Just to list a few examples: Billy Chong co-star Carl Scott can be seen as one of Bruce's students in the American section of the film. Alan Hsu (villain in Wong Jing's Last Hero In China and senior of the protagonists' Kung Fu school in the Joseph Kuo/Yuen Woo Ping collaborative effort 'Born Invincible') has a cameo along with Jackie Chan's best friend Mars (who can be seen in Dragon Lord) and I think even Lo Wei as himself during the shooting of The Big Boss.

Directorially, the film has its moments such as when Bruce thinks back to a conversation with a Hollywood executive producer as he's in a dark room at night time where the whole screen darkens & lightens before and after the flashback.

Another nice touch was a juxtaposition sequence prior to this challenge match where Bruce's challenger is being told how to fight Bruce by his cohort while Bruce is telling his assistant about the very last fight scene which needs filming.

Also, there's one scene towards the very end of the film which gestures to how Bruce could have died as it alludes to the mere notion that he had been ambushed by street thugs armed with machetes.

The way the scene is filmed half-way through the slaughter seems to have been lifted from a Shaw Bros. movie directed by Chang Cheh as the whole screen turns red, the quality of the print is shiny and it's played in slow motion with a wise choice of camera angles to accentuate what is an otherwise grisly and somewhat tacked-on scene.

My personal disappointment with this release of the film is the quality of the film print (which is one of the worst I've experienced DVD wise though there are worse prints out there e.g. prints where the colours are hardly existant and all you see is one hue of a particular colour plastered all over the screen making everything seem single-coloured and rather monotone).

To rub salt onto old wounds, there's even a nunchaku scene which has been trimmed (ironically when the film details Bruce's making of Way Of The Dragon, ironic because just like in the original UK version of Bruce Lee's classic movie, as soon as Bruce Li takes off his jacket we immediately cut to what happens after the nunchaku encounter).

It's kind of a shame really as the concept of the fight scene seemed ace: Bruce utilizing a nunchaku to counteract the mace of a Karateka.

Missed opportunity on behalf of the filmmakers to add some depth to the film if they took the film more seriously, but still a fun effort that should please Bruce Lee fans and chop-socky aficionados who don't seem to mind watching films where a star is exploited for the gain of big bucks and shallow entertainment - though having said that there's much better in that regard (especially within the realm of Bruceploitation fare...or really farce)!