DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY

DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY (Directed by Rob Cohen. Starring Jason Scott Lee, Lauren Holly, Michael Learned, Nancy Kwan, Kay Tong Lim, Robert Wagner).

Bruce Lee is a fine figure for a filmed biography: the now legendary martial artist who perfected a new fighting style and became the biggest Oriental movie star ever, before expiring under mysterious circumstances.

He lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse. But there are not many movies bearing the legend based on a true story that start with a confrontation with a mystic demon. Dragon is less biopic than novelisation, a life story told by someone who apparently feels fiction is stranger than truth. The result is a hit and myth affair.

And there is a great deal of hitting. Young Bruce flees Hong Kong after a standard chop-sockey battle with British sailors (during which his shirt is mysteriously ripped off to reveal his perfect torso). Arriving in America, he goes on to fight his way through life, lurching from one choreographed assault to another, only pausing for love scenes.

Every crisis is resolved with a good kicking, even business problems being worked out by unarmed combat. When Chinese elders, all answering to the description inscrutable and wise, ask him to close his Kung Fu school, he forgoes arbitration and agrees to take on their champ, the winner getting his way.

The result is the possibility the most artfully spectacular business meeting ever convened. Maybe they should try this at the Gatt talks. It would be sure to break the deadlock, just so long as there are no Chinese involved. If this movie is anything to go by, a half dozen of their best martial artists could bring the world to its knees without even breaking a sweat.

As might be expected in a film about an Asian trying to succeed in the West, Dragon makes some points about racism. Lee and his girlfriend walk out of a cinema showing Breakfast At Tiffany's as the audience erupts with laughter at an appalling Chinese comic stereotype, but their indignant reaction is undermined by Dragon's own exploitation of familiar stereotypes.

When a fight erupts in a Chinese restaurant, the whole staff turn into raging slanty-eyed devils, racing around with kitchen implements attempting to hack one another to death while Bruce acrobatically evades them. "Get sonavabitch! Kill him!" yells the chef, and his minions immediately launch another assault. After ten minutes of mayhem, the manageress snaps her fingers and they all obediently troop back to the kitchen, as if this sort of slaughter was an everyday occurence. Anyone who ever harboured suspicions about the nature of the meat in a Chinese meal will not be reassured by their apparent indifference to taking a cleaver to one another.

Jason Scott Lee (no relation) plays Bruce with a combination of grace and danger familiar from Bruce's films. It is an assured, starmaking performance but we still have little sense of Lee the man. With his wife, Linda Lee, a core adviser on the production, her character, appealingly played by Lauren Holly, becomes the principal adjunct to Lee's life, at the expense perhaps of other central influences, such as his father and his martial arts instructor. Or, for that matter, any of his other women.

Treated in some respects like an heroic, inter-racial love story, Bruce kicks and kisses to the end. Or almost the end. He dies off-screen, which is understandable in this context. It would be a little difficult to include his final moments when, in fact, the great warrior passed away as the result of an allergic reaction to aspirin while in the arms of his mistress.

Writer/director Rob Cohen instead gives him a literal confrontation with a metaphor which has apparently haunted the Lee family for generations. "If you don't conquer your own fears, you will pass your demons onto your children, as your father passed his onto you," he is told by his ageing mentor, who does all but call him grasshopper. Fearing for his young son Brandon, Lee does psychic battle with his demons, kicks six shades of living shit out of him and finally puts him to rest as his son scurries to safety.

Unfortunately for Cohen, history has changed the nature of the message. Given Brandon's equal untimely death since the film was completed, Bruce's final battle takes on an air of ironic, portentous failure.

Deliberately set up as a kind of martial arts fantasy with comic and romantic undercurrents, Dragon is not so much an examination of Lee as a substitute for his poor output since his demise. It is an enjoyable romp, fuelled by a star performance and told with energetic, snappy film-making. But it is hard to escape the feeling that a story that could, in other hands, have made a personal epic in the manner of Raging Bull turned out to be so much raging bullshit.