Game of Death (1978)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions or greed, take your pick with this film.

Bruce Lee had started work on Game of Death when he paused it to make Enter the Dragon. Lee died before being able to come back to Game of Death. This movie used 11 minutes that he had filmed previously and added an abysmal story around those minutes using body doubles and clips from other movies.

The story employed for this movie was that actor “Bobby” and his singer girlfriend were being targeted by gangsters to sign with them. “Bobby” ended up faking his death because he kept getting beaten up and later when his girlfriend was kidnapped went on a rampage against the bad guys.

I cannot express in words how awful this spliced together piece was. They used Bruce Lee’s reaction shots from other movies-one an outdoor reaction shot while they were inside, a cardboard cutout of Bruce's face pasted over a double's body, clips from his movies and two doubles who wore sunglasses who didn’t look like him and weren’t even built like him. The fights were slow and poorly choreographed with lots of backflips. Sammo Hung choreographed the fight scenes and it was like he’d never seen a Bruce Lee movie. The story was heavy handed and barely made sense. Worst of all, they used scenes from Bruce Lee’s real funeral and pictures of him in his coffin in this theatrical abomination. The creators of this movie said they were trying to honor Bruce Lee and see that his film was completed, by exploiting his funeral images, that argument went right out the window for me.

The only part of this movie worth watching is near the end for 11 minutes when the real Bruce Lee battled two antagonists, one of whom was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar*. This 11 minutes is noteworthy for the quality of the fights and his iconic yellow and black tracksuit which has been used in other movies paying homage such as Kill Bill. The fight with 7’2” (218.44 cm) Abdul-Jabbar has also been immortalized. In the movie Bruce was planning, he would have to go through 5 levels of a pagoda fighting against different masters of different styles, exposing their weaknesses and show how his system was superior. What remained at the time were these two fights which were spectacular. No wires, no flipping around, just amazing fluid lightning-fast moves. The rest of the movie was exposed for its fraud and ineptness with these two fights. Bruce always had to try and slow his moves down for the camera and still his moves were often too fast for the human eye. The rest of the movie’s fights which were plodding had to be sped up at times.

A 10 for the two true Bruce Lee scenes, -500 for this ridiculous attempt to capitalize on those scenes and for using his funeral images for their own putrid gain. There’s a reason Chuck Norris and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would have nothing to do with this movie fearing it was exploitive. Better to check out Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey from 2000 which contains more recently discovered clips from Bruce Lee’s version of Game of Death and his outline for that film. I could highly recommend that documentary, but not this movie. This Game of Death is only for Bruce Lee movie completionists with a high pain threshold.





*For those not familiar with him, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a retired American basketball player, one of the greatest, who dominated the league for years with his legendary Skyhook. Kareem was Bruce Lee's student and friend. He is also a civil rights activist, author, and philanthropist among other things.

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