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75 comments in total

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31 out of 36 people found the following comment useful :-
Cult Movies 52, 15 January 1999

Author: Carlos Xavier from Australia

52. DRAGON: The Bruce Lee story (action, 1993) A re-telling of the life of legendary martial-arts star Bruce Lee (Jason Scott Lee). From his brief childhood days in Hong Kong, to his days as a dishwasher, martial-arts teacher and eventual cinema superstar in Hollywood.

Critique: The life and death of Bruce Lee has inspired many a film and documentaries since his death. Most of these accounts center around Lee's 'mysterious' death from a 'brain edema', never developing anything really new of interest, just speculations. Incredibly it took over 20 years for a film to finally put to rest the many theories and innuendo.

"Dragon" is by far the best of the legendary Lee story, not only for omitting the many death scenarios but also for giving us the closest account of the man. Apart from these welcome omissions, the film wouldn't have worked without Jason Scott Lee in the role. He gives a spirited, charismatic performance that captures the zest for life that Lee possessed. It's a long way from one of his first 'extra' roles as an Asian immigrant in the rather forgetful "Born in East L.A." (1988). Scott Lee is totally appealing here, taking on such a legendary figure and making us believe that Lee is truly up there once again on the screen.

The film's major theme of the "demon curse" Lee's family inherited, had a frighteningly real resonance when, after the movie premiered, Lee's eldest son Brandon (for whom the film is dedicated) was accidentally killed on the set of "The Crow". This would prove to be his breakout film, just the same way Lee's last film, "Enter the Dragon", made him a world wide superstar. This gives the film an added prophetic note that puts it in a category all its own.

Based on wife Linda Lee Cadwell's book, "Bruce Lee: the man only I knew", directed with skillful restraint by Rob Cohen (who also co-scripted). Randy Edelman created the unforgettable musical score (you'll be humming the tune long after you hear it).

QUOTES: Linda: "All these years later people still wonder about the way he died. I prefer to remember the way he lived."

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29 out of 34 people found the following comment useful :-
Superb Character Portrayel by Jason Scott Lee, 20 January 2005

Author: mjw2305 from England

This film as a stand alone kung fu movie would be worthy of your attention, as it is very enjoyable and well made. The thing that makes it special is Jason Scott Lee's portrayal of the legend that is Bruce Lee.

He successfully captures his mannerisms, attitude and even his fighting style, extremely convincingly (a truly remarkable feat of acting ability.)

Although dramatised to heighten your viewing pleasure, the story actually follows the events in Bruce Lee's life and shows us the man behind the martial arts, covering his inner turmoils and personal struggles as well as his famous physical ability.

A great movie, befitting the legend that is Bruce Lee.

8/10

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22 out of 25 people found the following comment useful :-
An exceptional biopic - vivid but highly entertaining, amongst other things!, 23 October 2000
Author: lawrence-14

Once you became a Bruce Lee addict and begin seeing and reading the numerous different biographies and biopics, you're going to realise that DRAGON has quite a bit of fiction in it - and in the bits you don't really expect it to. For example, Lee approached Raymond Chow's Golden Harvest production company to make a marital arts movie, not the other way round and Chow isn't even the guy! Also, due to Lee's 'mysterious' death, the film also doesn't really an idea of how its going to wrap it all up. Therefore, the film is the perfect example of the word 'vivid'.

However, what makes Dragon the fine film that it is is that it decides to look at the two lesser-known aspects which dominated Lee's life - his long, ongoing 'battles' with an inner-demon and of course the racism of sixties America. These are managed and brought to the screen extremely well although to be fair they aren't particularly well developed.

The highlights would have to be the performances of Jason Scott Lee as Bruce and Lauren Holly as his devoted wife, Linda. They share a remarkable chemistry together and are certainly a credit to their subjects. This review probably hasn't made Dragon sound like a very good movie. Well if that's the case, then please think the opposite.

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27 out of 35 people found the following comment useful :-
The greatest legend ever in martial arts history, 20 April 2004

Author: mthakore from US

This movie was amazing. Before I saw this movie, I had an idea of who Bruce Lee was. I knew he was one of the greatest martial arts masters of all time and I knew he was in a couple of movies. But, I had know idea about the kind of man he was and the struggles he had to go through. He is, in my eyes, an amazing human being with an unimaginable amount of courage and a whole lot of heart. This movie showed me that much. The score is also one of the best I have heard in my life. All in all, this movie is an inspiring take on a legend's life. Great story, great music, great human being.... What more can I say? Amazing!

A solid 8/10

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12 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Great movie, but not a biography though, 27 November 2001

Author: Bruce from Quebec, Canada

This is a great movie. Nice action scenes, nice soundtrack, nice photo...But it's not a biography of the greatest fighter of all time: Bruce Lee. I am a big fan of Bruce and I know his life from A to Z, and this is not what I saw in that movie. I could tell all the mistakes I saw in the movie but here's just a few: In the movie: he is a unique child Reality: He had one brother and two sisters and he didn't live with his father only, he had his mother. He didn't leave Hong-Kong because of the cops (what the?...) he left because he wanted to be famous. And please! What is that story of the ghost from the depts of hell?!?!?

No, if you want to make a great action movie, good, go ahead, the right way to do it. But if you want to make a bio of a true legend, please tell the true story.

7/10

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11 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
Good as a movie, not really as a biography., 19 February 2005

Author: Boba_Fett1138 from Groningen, The Netherlands

The story told in the movie is really excellent and entertaining. However it feels more like a story based on the life of Bruce Lee rather then an actual biopic of his life.

Jason Scott Lee perfectly plays Kung Fu legend Bruce Lee. Not only the way he plays Lee is impressive but also his fighting skills.

The music by Randy Edelman was also surprising good.

There are way too many fictitious and untrue things added in the movie to be considered a fair biography. But does it really matter for the movie? It's like "Ed Wood" that was also filled with altered things and false truths but still it was a movie that told us the story of an unique character and what drove him. "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" isn't much different in that way. OK it's not completely fair to compare this movie to "Ed Wood" since that was a far superior movie to "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" (what a horrible title by the way).

The fight sequence are probably the best thing about the movie and they were highly entertaining, although very hard to believe that they actually really happened that way.

It's a good entertaining movie but if you want to get to know more about Bruce Lee this isn't the best material for you to start with.

7/10

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9 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Dragon Review And General Feelings On Bruce's Death, 22 July 2003
Author: JMFOX from London, England

Very Good But Horribly Inaccurate Account Of His Life

If you are watching this as someone who has no knowledge of Bruce Lee's life then this is a good fun action film but someone who knows the history and the story of his life may be dissapointed as this is not at all accurate. And knowing Bey Logan, he must cringe watching this. The film depicts Bruce's early childhood in Hong Kong, his teenage years in the US right way through to his eventual death in 1973. The element that I think drags this film down the most is the mythological side of it, if it had just been a realistic account of his life without the myths and demons, it would have faired much better. There are many innacurate scenes and occurences in this film which understandably makes the film more exciting for mainstream audiences but as a Bruce fan myself i wish they would have stuck to what actually happened. I wish there were more scenes where Bruce was on set of one of his films, like Way Of The Dragon or Fist Of Fury. There could have been more scenes with Bruce with Yip Man or Brandon. There could have been scenes of Bruce being challenged on the street in his infamous street fights, the episode of the green hornet they portrayed i don't think was an actual episode. And Bruce was not injured by the fighter at the martial arts challenge in Chinatown it was when he was weightlifting and pulled his back out. But the fight scenes are well choreographed.

Jason Scott Lee has got his portrayal of the man spot on, he brings the right amount emotion and power to the role, he's clearly done his research on Bruce's mannerism's and got himself in shape for the role as well as training for the fight scenes. Its hard to imagine anyone else who could have played the role, maybe Jet Li who at the time the film was made was 30 and roughly the right age to play Bruce, but Jet spoke very little English. Lauren Holly is equally as good in her role as Linda. The strong portrayals are in many ways successful because of the on set help of the real Linda and Shannon(who makes a cameo as a singer). The music is perhaps the film's strongest part, somehow the main score seems to catch the right emotion of Bruce's death and Brandon's death in 1993. I like the way the film captures the aura of Bruce Lee.

There will indeed never be another Bruce Lee. I find it fascinating to imagine what Bruce would have done if he had lived, the 80's and 90's would have been very different if Arnie, Stallone, Wiilis, Seagal and Van Damme had Bruce to compete with, Bruce is sometimes critcised for being a bad actor, but i disagree, if anyone has seen his episodes of `Longstreet' or `Marlowe' they will see that Bruce could convincingly carry a dramatic scene given the right script and no dubbing and he oozed charisma, and he showed glimpses of good acting in Enter The Dragon.

Being a Bruce fan i kind of wish that Jet Li would do the films that bruce did or was planning on doing, Jet's early work in Honk Kong like the Shaolin Temple or more recent stuff like Fist Of Legend(remake of Fist Of Fury) and Once Upon A Time In China was very promising and it seemed he was the successor to Bruce but instead now he's doing crap in Hollywood with DMX and Jason Statham. Strangely the mediocre Lethal Weapon 4 is Jet's best Hollywood film, Maybe Jet should do a project with John Woo, it would be interesting and they'd probably get the best out of each other.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
A BIO-PIC OF CONSIDERABLE ARTISTIC MERIT., 4 October 1999
Author: ALAN MOUNT from CARDIFF, WALES

I had severe misgivings when I heard about the making of this movie. Too many deplorable attempts had been made by tenth-rate Hong Kong movie-makers over the years at portraying Lee's remarkable life that another one,even an American one, seemed to promise more of the same.How wrong I was,"DRAGON" is a remarkably well made biopic made by people who obviously had genuine respect for their legendary subject.This respect,however, did not prevent them from embellishing aspects of Lee's life and experiences with elements that were exaggerated and sometimes hokey.This is true of most biopics though and "DRAGON" is not the worst offender.The movie stands and falls by the performance of Jason Scott Lee and what he achieves here is quite extraordinary and under-rated.Although he does not look very much like the late martial arts maestro,he has captured his charisma and gestures,even the voice down to a tee.His handling of the fight sequences is perhaps the weakest element in his portrayal,relying as it does on too much showy acrobatics.He does enough though,as everyone involved does,to illustrate what it was about Lee that made him one of the key figures of twentieth century pop culture.It is sad that Scott Lee himself seems so far unable to progress very far from this very promising lead in a major studio picture.We can only hope that this changes soon as he proved to be a personable lead here and in one or two other movies.

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11 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
good flick, but inaccurate, 17 May 2003
Author: mrmoore78 from Las Vegas, NV

I really liked Jason Scott Lee's portrayal of Bruce Lee, but I noticed many inaccuracies in the story. If I had not seen the AMC special on Lee last year, I would not have a problem.

-according to Linda Lee, Bruce was not hurt when competing for the right to teach whoever he wanted to. He hurt himself when he didn't stretch properly for a workout in 1970. That was the big inaccuracy

-Bruce auditioned for another role in early 1965 before the role of Kato was offered to him.

- other roles he took in America were completely ignored: "Marlowe", his appearances on "Longstreet", etc...the movie went right from 1967 to 1972 within a minute

If you want to see a really good special on Lee, as well as see lost footage from a project that was butchered after he died, check out the AMC documentary.

-

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Confusion in the narrative and an overly comic book approach does not hinder the lead performance..., 18 November 2007

Author: moonspinner55 from redlands, ca

The turbulent, sometimes trying life of Bruce Lee, born Lee Jun-Fan in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, who was the leading proponent of Wing Chun Gung Fu and Wu style Tai Chi Chuan in the mid-'60s, as well as a boxing champ, a California martial-arts teacher, loving husband to a young American woman who soon gave him two children, and an international television and movie star in the early 1970s. Jason Scott Lee gives a commanding, one-of-a-kind performance as Bruce Lee, and the film is a well-produced chronicle of one of the most curious and intriguing icons of the last 50 years. Still, the picture seems to play a little fast and loose with the facts, and anyone hoping for a comprehensive look behind the legend is likely to be disappointed. Because this is a dramatized biography of possibly the most popular of martial-arts masters, there's certainly a whole lot of mortal combat (some of which is purely extraneous, pumped up to satisfy the target audience), and the approach is a bit more 'comic book' than serious students might like. The supporting characters and extras are over-directed in their enthusiasm, yet nothing seems to get in the way of Jason Scott Lee who, though perhaps more bulky in frame than the real Bruce Lee, does everything he can with this role and more. ** from ****

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