Enter the Dragon (1973)

This kind of feels like a porno. A porno has a thin storyline designed to justify all the sex scenes. Likewise, this film has a moronic and nonsensical plot designed as an excuse to shove in fight scenes. You know, I won't even go into the stupidity of this film, and I will just say that maybe a person with a gun could kill all these idiots who fight using nothing but their fists. But hey, for some reason no one in these films ever uses guns, so they have to fight for an eternity. I was not impressed by the action at all. It is pretty dull and often involuntarily funny. I guess low-IQ teenagers might find this enjoyable. Most others won't.

This movie was not exactly worth my watching because I am not one to watch Kung Fu movies. I like how to movie has an old feel to it. How it was filmed with ADR and there was no sounds recorded while filming. The sound and actions were spot of off and that made the movie hard to watch. It's punches were not in time with the sound of a punch.*SPOILER* I think they killed Williams because he was really nosy in other peoples lives and he was really annoying to watch in the movie. This movie stole music and sound effects from spy movies like James Bond. Overall this movie was not for someone who doesn't like Kung Fu but if you did then it is an entertaining movie.

Enter The Dragon is a martial arts action film, released in 1973. It is a joint American-Chinese production and it is set both in USA and Hong Kong. Bruce Lee acts as a martial artist expert who is infiltrated in a private island governed by the suspected criminal lord Han (Shin Kien). He attends a martial arts tournament, also joined by gambler Roper (John Saxon) and Vietnam war veteran Williams (Jim Kelly). It is soon clear that Han is a brutal dictator, who among other crimes beats Williams to death because he didn't want to cooperate. If not willing to cooperate, all the other competitors, now almost prisoners, have to fear the same destiny. Thanks to Lee strength, ability and cleverness, they are all saved by the military, called to take control of the island. Because I don't like Kung-Fu movies, I didn't really like this movie, and i found it repetitive and boring. However, I think it was worth my time watching because it is considered to be one of the most famous martial movie of all times. Moreover, Bruce Lee became an icon within movies of his genre. Even if Enter The Dragon is now more than 40 years old, it is still fascinating. Kung-Fu scenes have some grace in them (especially the ones played by Bruce Lee) and the fighting is realistic. Nevertheless, the audio quality is not that good. Audio doesn't match to lip movements or to actions, and some sounds are not realistic. I guess we could say that the movie did not age well from a cinematic point of view, but it is still a great movie because of acting and contents. Enter The Dragon clearly "steal" some ingredients from James Bond, as the music and the quantity of action. However, it is does represent an inspiration for newer martial arts movies, as Karate Kid or Rocky. Both the movie and Bruce Lee's performance also influenced recent films as Kill Bill or Fight Club.

So strange for me to finally watch this epochal film after only knowing it through posters! I remember watching the Kung Fu TV series starring David Carradine but was too young to get into the cinema to see any of Bruce Lee's films. This of course was the biggest and most successful of them all, the sadness being of course that Lee didn't live to see the worldwide success that the movie became.To be fair, the film plays like a martial-arts James Bond caper with Lee as the secret agent hired by a plummy-voiced English spymaster to bring down the Blofeld-like cat-stroking master-villain Han in his Hong Kong back-yard as well as avenging the death of his sister, driven to hari-kiri by a pursuing gang of local hoodlums and their Western boss. His cover is attending a sort of last-man-standing martial arts tournament set up by Han whose real motive in so doing is to recruit more members to his criminal sect. Also in it to win it are John Saxon and Jim Kelly, both martial arts experts themselves, the former a white devil-may-care shyster-gambler on the run from the mob and the latter a stereotypical jive-talking, sex-machine black guy on the run from racist cops he's had the temerity to answer back to.Sure the story is clichéd, right down to the mirrored conclusion lifted straight from "The Lady From Shanghai", the movie is far from perfectly dubbed, the acting is a bit wooden in places and Han is hardly the most dastardly villain you'll ever meet, but it's all about Lee, as nimble as a cat but as sharp as a cobra in set-piece after set-piece of high-kicking karate-chopping action. At what must have been the height of his physical condition one can only imagine the greater success which would have surely awaited him following this film's huge success which I'm positive it would have achieved even without the commercial boost, if that's the right word, from the unexpected death on release of its main star. In particular, his mastery of the nanchukkas has to be seen to be believed.Throw in another scintillating Lalo Schifrin soundtrack and you have a terrific action movie built around an exciting and charismatic star who sadly didn't get to see its great success which would surely have taken him into the superstar bracket.