Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993)

Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story arrives from 1993, a Universal biographical drama with a supernatural demon bolted to its spine, and it remains a curious artifact of a studio system that had, at that moment, decided to let an Asian man carry a sixteen million dollar picture. Jason Scott Lee performs the role with a gymnast's eagerness and no prior martial arts training, which the fight choreography kindly conceals. The casting is the notable achievement. A largely Asian supporting cast surrounds him, Nancy Kwan appears as the restaurant owner who funds his education, and the film pauses to acknowledge her own historic passage through Hollywood. For a mainstream American release of its era, that is not nothing.

The film's real subject is prejudice, and it does not whisper. Bruce watches Breakfast at Tiffany's and recoils at Mickey Rooney's bucktoothed turn, while Linda, who had been enjoying the picture, learns to share his disgust in real time. Later, the lead in Kung Fu goes to David Carradine, and the betrayal lands like a verdict. These scenes function as argument, and they are staged as argument, with the audience seated beside Linda for the lesson. The institutional racism of the industry is the engine of the plot, and the film is strongest when it simply shows the machinery turning. When it stops to explain the machinery, the momentum sags.

Elsewhere this is a conventional showbiz biography. Linda supports, suffers, and waits. Her interior life is gestured at and then abandoned, which the film treats as sufficient. The invented demon stands in for an inner struggle, dramatic license dressed as mysticism, and it never earns its screen time. Hollywood's gatekeeping takes a beating, though the complaint is about who gets excluded, not about the business of exclusion. The movie wants us to remember how Bruce lived, and it mostly succeeds, provided we agree to be reminded every few minutes.