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Game of Death


Game of Death (Clouse, 1978)




In 1972, Bruce Lee came up with an idea for the movie called The Game of Death, where he would play a martial arts master forced out of retirement by a gang planning a heist of a pagoda. The film would be a culmination of sorts of his philosophy of martial arts, wherein he would defeat his enemies through his superior adaptability. He shot three fight scenes that would form part of the climax, where he goes up different levels of the pagoda and fights Dan Inosanto (Lee’s sparring partner and previously known to me for his involvement in Steven Seagal’s best movie, Out for Justice), Hapkido master Ji Han-jae, and finally Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who at the time had been Lee’s student). Before Lee finished the movie, he left to make Enter the Dragon and died before the latter film was released and became a massive success and his own popularity shot through the roof posthumously.

In the subsequent years, people decided to cash in on said popularity and start churning out movies which claimed to star Bruce Lee, starred people who looked a bit like Bruce Lee and sometimes had similar names, were about Bruce Lee himself or merely placed him in outlandish premises. A handful of these films I have seen and at least one I have enjoyed (Challenge of the Tiger, starring Bruce Le, who played the martial arts instructor in Pieces, and Richard Harrison, who yelled into a Garfield phone in Ninja Terminator). Eventually Golden Harvest, the studio behind the films Lee made when he was alive, decided that they also wanted to make some of this money now that he was dead. They got back Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse, dug up the original footage and “completed” the movie, by which I mean hobble together that footage with a completely unrelated plot. (A few years later they released a “sequel”, Game of Death II, that is quite a bit of fun outside of a questionable first act. I mean, how can you go wrong with a man in a lion suit, a villain played by Hwang Jang-Lee and action choreography by Yuen Woo-Ping?)

Game of Death, as the finished film is called, is the official Brucesploitation movie in a way, and its most interesting qualities stem from that. The plot, about an underworld syndicate trying to strong arm Lee’s character so they can exploit his fame, echoes not just Lee’s original story idea, but also the production circumstances, with Golden Harvest looking to exploit Lee’s image in as crass a manner as possible. Their methods of bringing Lee back on screen range from amusing (giving Lee doubles Kim Tai-jong and Yuen Biao beards and big sunglasses or hiding their face in the shadows) to outright laughable (a picture of Lee’s face pasted on a mirror over the reflection of the real actor’s face) to completely shameless (using footage of Lee’s open casket funeral). The film almost becomes a metaphor for this idea, and ends up acknowledging that it’s a self-defeating one. No matter how well the manufactured Lees ape his fighting style and body language, there’s no competing with the real deal, and the original footage, even in its heavily truncated form, are exhilarating and deflate the preceding sections by contrast. (The Criterion release includes a longer edit of the footage, better fleshing out Lee’s ideas around superiority through adaptability. The fight scenes in their longer form let us bask in his charisma even more, give the scenes a sense of strategy and real triumph that are missing in the released film.) In an age when dead actors are being exhumed via CGI to be put in blockbusters and dead musicians are playing Coachella in hologram form, not to mention the prevalence of deepfakes, the movie resonates in this respect.

It’s those qualities that make the movie particularly fascinating, but as I went into it with low expectations (most people I know who’ve seen it find it utter trash that doesn’t do justice to Lee’s memory, a not unfair assessment), I found it reasonably diverting. Robert Clouse may not be a great visual stylist (much of the fighting in Enter the Dragon is shot in a flat, demonstrative manner, although it worked in that movie as it was tasked with selling the concept of martial arts cinema to American audiences), but he does give this movie an attractive travelogue quality with its Hong Kong locations. The rousing theme music by John Barry makes the movie feel much classier than it is. Out of the “new” supporting cast, Dean Jagger looks very happy to be here despite playing a villain, while Colleen Camp plays the hero’s singer girlfriend and sings a song that plays at the end. (If you, like me, sometimes play the game that actors play the same character across different movies, this fits in pretty seamlessly before her role as a country singer in They All Laughed.) And of course, seeing Abdul-Jabbar fight Lee is seeing two formidable bodies move in sublimely choreographed concert.

The fight scenes are choreographed by Sammo Hung doing an approximation of Lee’s style, and while the construction is at least a little slapdash due to the need to pass it off as the real Lee, the camera is pulled back far enough and the cutting conservative enough that the scenes are easy to follow and relatively engaging. There’s one action sequence involving a couple of bikers in a warehouse where the prevalence of slow motion makes it indirectly capture the staccato rhythms of Lee’s best fight scenes. The bikers don tracksuits and dehumanizing face-covering helmets that give the scene an almost metaphoric quality, as if they, like Lee, are being objectified through the film’s exploitation. Of course, this is also the scene where Lee puts on one of the tracksuits (perhaps the most famous one in the movies) with a pair of yellow Onitsuka Tigers to match, and only a star of Lee’s magnetism could make an outfit this ridiculous look cool. The king is dead, long live the king.