Review of Birth of the Dragon (2017) by Dottheeyes — 24 Aug 2017

This is a fun and interesting film. It deserves more positive reviews than it will inevitably receive. It utilizes Bruce Lee the way A Hard Day's Night and Help! utilized the Beatles; "Bruce Lee" is a character here in a martial-arts action film, not a definitive and reverent biopic.

Set in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, it lifts elements from Lee's biography—his controversial teaching of kung fu to Caucasians, his mysterious and contested private fight with Shaolin master Wong Jack Man—but it also includes entirely fictional characters and passages, including a scene in which Lee and Wong elaborately fight their way through a Triad-owned restaurant.

(The choreography here and elsewhere is excellent.) The end result, I believe, nicely plays as an extension of Lee's pop mystique and brand, and I half suspect the man himself, no stranger to self-mythologizing, would smile and nod in approval.

He is played by a convincing Philip Ng, a Hong Kong-born actor who achieves an appropriate combination of arrogance and charisma. Even better is Xia Yu as Wong; his is an absolutely magnetic variation on the he-doesn't-want-any-trouble warrior-pacifist archetype, and it is a pleasure to lean into his every delectably inscrutable line of kung-fu philosophizing.