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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another great DVD reissue that does justice to the format., February 13, 2000
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story takes liberties with the bio-film setup and succeeds in spades, resulting in something much more interesting and challenging than straight adaptations of a life.Director Rob Cohen's sure hand with actors gives him an edge, surely, and his cast is wonderful -- Lauren Holly was in her late 20s at filming but plays her character as a teen deftly. Jason Scott Lee may not look much like Bruce Lee, but unless Brandon Lee were cast, that's an insurmountable limitation. What Jason Scott Lee creates is a Bruce Lee that's much more likeable, more of a boy next door, than the real Bruce Lee, and considering the romantic, mythical tone of the film in general, it was an apt choice. His athleticism and dedication make him come alive onscreen, and the moment when he explodes at Holly shows him as nuts as Bruce Lee was. The most brilliant touch of this movie was in its appropriation of certain Bruce Lee film idioms. The single most true-to-fact sequence in Dragon, in fact, is the back-alley fight with the cooks. The music, staging, editing and character behaviour here are so much like Lee's films (with the exception of The Chinese Connection) that they emblematize Lee in a way that's purely cinematic. Randy Edelman's score for the whole film was excellent ; this is one reason why you'll very often hear the "Dragon" theme used in film trailers -- it is perhaps the most widely used trailer score throughout the '90s. But his work was especially fit in this sequence. And the DVD edition? Consider this: Three pages worth of just selection screens for bonus materials; interviews with Linda Lee Cadwell, Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly (I wish there could've been more, though); Jason Scott Lee's screen test -- and not just standing there doing a monologue, but a fantastically staged and filmed fight sequence that could easily have been in a feature; outtakes of the Ed Parker fight sequence; storyboards; a Bruce Lee on-camera interview, photographs from Bruce Lee's life...the only misstep here was Linda Lee Cadwell's verbal commentary to lead off the film. Though quite charming on camera and approachable, she's unbelievably stiff when delivering a written speech, and I wish she had just improvised and *talked* instead of *presented* her thoughts on her husband's life. Dragon is not true to life. The real-life Bruce Lee, though vivacious and ambitious, is not as likeable as the persona presented here. As the interview footage shows, Bruce Lee was an arrogant man, a man not afraid to proclaim his own greatness, with very little sense of gaucherie. And Dragon's ambiguous ending ("Bruce fell into a mysterious coma...") is probably because some reports placed Lee at a mistress' house at the time of his death, while others pointed to drug use and/or triad affiliations. But Cohen has made a conscious choice to make Dragon part of the myth, not the "truth", and his sensibility remains consistent and effective throughout the film. Don't watch Dragon to get a real sense of Lee's real-life character. Instead. sit back and watch an earnest celebration, a film interested in proponing the Bruce Lee myth, and simply a good story about an interracial romance made more dynamic by means of action-film conventions.
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