“Game Of Death” – The Best Kung-Fu Movie You’ve Never Seen
We all know Bruce Lee – he’s by far the single most influential martial arts actor of all time despite completing only a handful of movies. More modern actors, such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li, cite him as a major influence (which is quite obvious in their performances), and his untimely death in 1973 spurred a tidal wave of imitators – literally. Movies starring Bruce Li, Bryce Lee, Bruuce Lee and other actors using any variation of his name swept the market, none of which were any good. Still, the public consumed them without question – that’s how starved for Bruce Lee they all were! Hmm, if only there was a movie Bruce Lee himself started, but never finished… If only that movie contained some of his best fight scenes ever, which could be padded with awkward editing to pretend that Bruce Lee is in it… Oh wait!
Enter “Game of Death”, which is both the best and worst Bruce Lee movie, depending on how you look at it. As I stated earlier, Bruce Lee really wanted to write, direct, produce and star in this movie, but had to postpone in it order to do “Enter the Dragon”, the movie that made him famous worldwide. His tragic death happened not long afterwards, so he sadly never got the chance to bring his greatest, most ambitious project to life. Enter director Robert Clouse, who decided to use stock footage and body doubles in order to complete the footage that Lee had already shot. The result is… Well, a mixed bag, but I’m getting to that.
The first half of the movie (well, a bit more than half, but whatever) is an absolute disgrace. And I’m not saying that it’s bad in the way that “The Room” is bad, in which you can see that there’s effort, but no skill. No, this is just insulting. The plot makes no sense – “Bruce Lee” (I’m placing quotation marks around his name because it’s not really Lee for the majority of the film) plays an actor who’s the best martial artist around. Hilarious(ly insulting) measures have been taken to convince the audience that this is really Lee, such as superimposing his face over another actor’s. It’s pathetic. Anyway, some sort of criminal syndicate consisting of the other best martial artists tries to convince him to join them, but he refuses. As a result, they try to assassinate him by shooting him in the face, conveniently explaining why the actor in the latter half looks different from the one in the former half.
As a result of the assassination attempt, the actor decides to fake his death. And just to make sure that Lee is properly rolling around in his grave, they show actual footage of his funeral, including shots of him in his dead body in his coffin. It’s absolutely disgusting. Thankfully, that’s about where the movie starts to get really good. The syndicate finds out the actor is alive, so they kidnap his fiancée and take her to a… restaurant or something? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they have all their people there, each proficient in a different fighting style, and each placed on a different floor.
In case you decided to skip the above paragraphs in order to ignore the stupid, allow me to reiterate – Bruce Lee fights a different martial artist on each floor of a building, and it is GLORIOUS! This is the part where the pre-recorded footage comes into play, and it’s by far the single best half hour you can POSSIBLY have if you want to have a good time with a kung-fu movie! It is AMAZING, especially in contrast with the crap that was fed to us earlier. You really have to see it to believe it. Lee not only perfects the classic formula – he surpasses it. For example, he fights a character played by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball player. Why is that notable, you ask? Well, because he’s over 7 feet tall, that’s why! It’s brilliant!
Well, I guess you could just try to find all the fight scenes on YouTube or something, but where’s the fun in that? “Game of Death”, for better or for worse, comes in a complete package. So if you want to have a night of “so bad it’s good” followed immediately by “so good it’s good”, there’s literally nothing else you can get to fare better! Despite its numerous shortcomings, the good parts of “Game of Death” are so good that they singlehandedly make it one of the best kung-fu movies ever made!