As is true for James Dean, the legend of
martial-arts superstar Bruce Lee revolves around a surprisingly small body of
work. In fact, Lee starred in only one English-language feature, Enter the Dragon (1973), the release of
which he did not live to see. Left unfinished in the wake of Lee’s death were
various projects including Game of Death,
an allegorical action film whose production was suspended when Lee got the
chance to make Enter the Dragon.
Several years after Lee’s death, however, Enter
the Dragon director Robert Clouse was hired to build a film around the
extant Game of Death footage. Game of Death is as exploitive,
ghoulish, and tacky as most attempts to collateralize the public’s affection
for a dead actor—here’s looking at you, The
Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)—but Game
of Death still has significance for Lee fans. For a good 10 minutes during
the climax, when the real Lee is visible kicking and punching his way through a
trio of fight scenarios, Game of Death
becomes a “lost” film rediscovered. Unfortunately, everything else about Game of Death is highly problematic.
After
sneakily opening the movie by repurposing a famous screen fight between Lee and
Chuck Norris (from 1973’s Return of the
Dragon), Clouse employs stand-ins, occasionally punctuated by shots of the
real Lee from Enter the Dragon
outtakes, to simulate the star’s appearance. This technique doesn’t work,
especially when chintzy optical effects are utilized to, say, superimpose a
towel around Lee’s shoulders. By the end of the movie, Clouse blatantly cuts
back and forth between vintage Lee footage and new shots of stand-ins, with the
stand-ins’ faces plainly visible. It’s all quite insulting and
ridiculous—adjectives that could just as easily be applied to the plot, about a
movie star (Lee) who fakes his death so he can seek revenge against a mobster.
In extensive English-language scenes, indifferent American actors Dean Jagger,
Hugh O’Brian, and Gig Young deliver boring exposition while earnest American starlet
Colleen Camp tries to fabricate a relationship with a phantom costar. The
middle of the movie, in which the Americans and the stand-ins carry the plot
almost completely, is borderline interminable. On the plus side, the folks
behind Game of Death spent lavishly on
post-production, commissioning a 007-style opening-credits sequence and hiring
top-shelf composer John Barry (deepening the 007 association) to give the
picture a fuller musical voice than it actually deserves.
The best material in Game of Death doesn’t arrive until the
finale, when Lee slips on a yellow tracksuit (later referenced in Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies) to
square off against opponents including a giant temple guard played by
basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabar. The sight of comparatively tiny Lee
battling the towering Jabar is hard to shake, as is, of course, the sheer
charisma and elegance that Lee exudes whenever he’s onscreen. Lee is so
commanding, in fact, that one wishes his Hollywood swan song was more fitting
than this hack job. The makers of Game of
Death trample so clumsily over Lee’s dignity that they even include a shot
of the real Lee’s corpse, which was displayed publicly during a wake in Hong
Kong.
Game
of Death: LAME
