Way of the Dragon (4 Stars)

Although this is Bruce Lee's third film, I always think of it as his fourth. It was released in 1972 in Hong Kong, but it wasn't shown in England until summer 1974, six months after "Enter the Dragon".

In the film Bruce Lee plays Tang Lung, a man sent from Hong Kong to Rome to help a relative called Wang who is having trouble with his restaurant. The Italian mob want to buy the restaurant, and when he refuses they scare the customers away.

Maybe four stars is too high a rating for this film. It begins with comedy, which isn't bad in itself, except that the humour just isn't funny. Unable to understand English (or Italian, presumably) he orders five bowls of soup by mistake. For the next 15 minutes he's having to run to the toilet to relieve himself. It's not particularly funny the first time, but by the third time I wanted to throw something at the screen.

A further problem is the dialogue. The film is partly in Chinese, partly in English. It's silly that everyone in Rome speaks English, but I'll let that go. What disturbs me is that the English voices all sound so artificial. My guess is that the film was originally made with a mixture of English and Chinese (Cantonese). When it was released in Hong Kong the English voices were dubbed into Chinese. By the time the film was released internationally, the original audio track was lost, so the Chinese was dubbed back into English by third rate voice actors.

The film has some good fights, especially the fight with Chuck Norris in the Colosseum, but they're not up to the quality of the fights in his other films.

Bruce Lee's love interest in this film is Wang's niece, Chen Ching Hua, plaed by Nora Miao, who we already saw in "Fist of Fury".

Maybe I should call her his almost-love-interest. She's romantically interested in him, but it's not just that he isn't interested in her, he doesn't even notice. Is he stupid? I feel like slapping him. Or maybe I shouldn't.

This is a film for hardcore Bruce Lee fans. Most people won't like it.

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