Game of Death (1978)

Rated R for violence, I guess.  There's some blood.   People die.  I do find it odd that a James Bond movie can have the same amount of violence (maybe a little less blood) and get a PG rating and Game of Death gets an R.  There is some language in it, tame by almost any other generation.  But it was 1978.  Probably the most upsetting part is that you see Bruce Lee's real corpse in the movie.  Yeah, that can mess you up.

DIRECTORS:  Robert Clouse and Bruce Lee

"Wait...that's this movie?"  I wasn't prepped guys.  I mean, I knew that Bruce Lee died young.  I knew that.  I never really went into the details about how Bruce Lee died.  I never watched Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.  None of that.  I knew that he died young.  I knew that there were a lot of people who tried to copy his entire persona.  What I didn't really realize was that the final Bruce Lee movie was cobbled together from scraps of early footage coupled with scenes from other movies.  I mean, I'm late coming to the party for this one (and I'm really trying not to be disrespectful!), but the whole connection between Bruce Lee's death and Brandon Lee's death?  Listen, I hate conspiracy theories, but goodness me.  They even talk about the thing that would kill Brandon Lee in Game of Death.  It's very upsetting.  But to finsh both movies using doubles mired in shadow? Come on.  That's a bit on the nose, isn't it?

I wonder what the original Game of Death looked like.  Honestly, I could probably find out pretty darned easily.  The Criterion box has two supplemental discs on it where I'm sure it's discussed in depth.  I could do a quick Google search.  I just know that it couldn't have been the movie I watched.  First of all, the whole thing is just morbid. That was his real funeral footage, guys.  There's a line between honoring Bruce Lee, the legend and getting the coverage you want using his actual, real-life corpse.  Also, what's with the gravedigging scene?  He really died.  I don't get the vibe that "this is what Bruce would have wanted."  Knowing that the film industry would try to capitalize on the hole left behind by Bruce Lee's passing, none of this comes across as the tribute that elements of this movie are pushing for.  Like, the end is nice, having Bruce Lee's greatest moments.  Putting a little bit more money into the movie by hiring John Barry to do the soundtrack, that's pretty nice.  But everything else seems to be marketing this movie as "The Last Chance to See Bruce Lee."  It's all a bit much.

It's almost hard talking about this movie because it almost has that kind of improvised quality to the film.  It reads like everyone's just agreeing to a communal lie about what this movie was about. Everything is built around existing footage.  Honestly, there's some Plan 9 from Outer Space stuff happening around Bela Lugosi with this movie.  Admittedly, Lee filmed a lot more and he filmed some pivotal sequences in this movie.  It's just that the stuff that they chose to work around reads as...kind of gross?  Game of Death plays with the idea that Bruce Lee fakes his own death after his face is destroyed by a bullet.  They use the Fist of Fury ending (you know, the really memorable one?) and shoot him in the face.  This leads to an interesting plot device.  Like, what if Bruce Lee had to conceal his identity to get revenge on the people who tried to kill him?  It's not a bad plot.  There's almost an element of You Only Live Twice to the movie, which is kind of cool.  But the movie A) doesn't have a convincing Bruce Lee body double and B) abandons the conceit of the film when they actually have Bruce Lee-filmed scenes.

What we kind of get at the end is "Why did we spend so much time talking about being disguised and having Ann go through hell if we were just going to abandon the whole disguise thing?"  I know. I'm being unfair.  All of these choices exist because we need to cover up the fact that Bruce Lee didn't film a lot of the movie.  But that's all you really have to criticize.  The movie is about the disguises.  And we only really get two disguises.  We get bearded Bruce Lee (which is just straight up silly the fact that Dr. Land doesn't figure out that someone with very specific Kung Fu moves and noises isn't the guy who just did that in movies forever and he just killed that dude) and full old-man makeup. That's it.  The central point of the movie was this guy who could be anyone and we get two characters?  It's funny.  Dr. Land didn't figure out that Billy Lo was after him until the old man sequence happened.  When Billy Lo literally attacked him with a beard, it was "Who is that bearded man and what does he want with me?"  But Carl is beaten in isolation and he's like, "Billy Lo!"

The funny thing is, there was a time in my life that I would have lost it over this movie.  It would have been my movie.  I'm currently listening to the John Barry soundtrack and it is very that era of James Bond that is so good.  But the movie opens borderline as a James Bond movie.  That opening sequence is stealing from Maurice Binder pretty hard.  The opening of the movie mind has well been The Man with the Golden Gun.  I'm not saying that it is a bad thing.  If you were trying to sell me on a movie that absolutely should not exist, gussying it up like a '70s James Bond movie is the smartest move that you could make.  Because elements of this movie are sick.  For all of the triage surgery that this movie is doing to cobble it together, it's pretty amazingly filmed.  Sure, every time Billy Lo is in a sequence, it's shot from a wide angle with something obscuring the double's face.  The dub?  Oh my, the dub does a bigger job of highlighting the fact that Bruce Lee isn't talking.  

Like, Bruce Lee movies have always been criticized for their dubs of Lee.  Am I crazy for thinking that Enter the Dragon had Lee do his own voice, but just minimal dialogue?   Also, I know it was 1978.  Standards were different.  But would it have been such a crime to find someone who could sound like Bruce Lee?  Soundalikes exist for everything nowadays.  Yeah, they aren't perfect.  But going that hard in to midwestern for Bruce Lee was silly.  It's just absurd.  

The biggest question: Is Game of Death watchable?  Yeah.  I'll even go as far as to say that it's kind of fun.  Here's the thing.  Bruce Lee movies are excuses to watch Bruce Lee do some rad kung fu.  The stories are borderline always the same.  This one feels a bit more tasteless than I thought it was going to be.  I think that the filmmakers probably lied to themselves and said that they were making something that was going to be a lasting tribute to this great martial artist.  But it's just a Bruce Lee movie that you still have to wait through a weak plot to get to Bruce Lee beating everyone else up.  (Side note:  Billy Lo gets hilariously better at kung fu as the movie progresses.  I know  he held back for Ann in the beginning, but he shouldn't be THAT much better by the end of the movie.  Also, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was hilariously massive and it's worth the watch just to have the Jaws comparison that this James Bond send up needed.) 

It's fun.  I can't deny that it's fun.  But also, man, should this movie have been made?  No.  This is just capitalizing on death.