How to Defend a Chinese Restaurant

Bruce Lee was big business. Although Hollywood, for years, didn’t know what to do with him, thinking the actor “too Asian” (or, let’s be honest, they probably thought far more racist things about Lee) to work in the mainstream Hollywood scene. He couldn’t get leading parts at all, and any attempt at engineering his own lead roles ended in failure. It was only when he bailed out of the Hollywood machine, making for Hong Kong to work with Golden Harvest, that he got the lead roles he was looking for. And then, suddenly, his films were massive successes. Made on the cheap, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, his films made hundreds of millions. The Big Boss pulled in $50 Mil internationally during its run. Fist of Fury made $100 Mil. It was only to be expected that further films from the actor would do just as well. We also like to assume that Hollywood, upon seeing the returns the actor was bringing in, realized they’d fucked up bad.

His third film technically didn’t come out in the West until after his death (and after the release of Enter the Dragon, his fourth movie, prompting some releases to change the name of this movie to Return of the Dragon even though the two films were unrelated). Titled The Way of the Dragon (which, okay, still had “dragon” in the title), this film was the first produced under Lee’s company Concord Production, Inc. (a co-creation with Golden Harvest) and was also Lee’s first time writing, directing, and starring in the same film. Sadly, it also marked the last film Lee would see released before his untimely death. And, well, it is another winner for the actor.

Bearing in mind that all of Lee’s films have a very 1970s feel to them (owing to the era made and released) and likely haven’t aged well for modern audiences, this film is an excellent showcase for the actor’s talents. Lee cuts a solid figure in this movie, nimbly handling being both a charismatic, and goofy, lead figure for the film’s story while also providing all the action special effects the film needed. His lightning fast action style and fighting prowess were on display in the film in ways we hadn’t even seen before in his previous works (and those were still a cut above everything else in the genre that had been released before). This was a movie engineered by Lee to be the perfect showcase for his talent on all fronts and, by that measure, it more than succeeds.

Lee stars in The Way of the Dragon as Tang Lung, a country guy from the outskirts of Hong Kong called in to help a friend’s cousin who lives out in Italy and is having some trouble. The cousin, Chen Ching-hua (Nora Miao), runs a Chinese restaurant in Rome, and everything was going fine until a gang of mobsters started coming around. They wanted to buy up the restaurant for their boss, and when Chen wouldn’t sell, they started terrorizing the place. Damaging property, chasing customers off, doing anything they could to get rid of the clients and drive the place out of business. Chen expected that her cousin would send a lawyer or someone to negotiate with the bad guys. Instead, though, he sent Tang Lung.

At first Chen wasn’t impressed by Tang, finding him to be a country bumpkin that wouldn’t be able to handle the situation at hand. But then, when the bad guys came around and tried to pick a fight with the wait staff (who were all learning karate to defend the restaurant), Tang stepped in to resolve the matter… with his fists. Suddenly it seemed like the tables had turned and the restaurant could be saved. Tang was there and he’d defend the place from all threats. But the criminals weren’t likely to give up so easily, and the boss (Jon Benn) won’t be dissuaded so easily. Tang soon finds himself under threat, his life on the line, with a choice to leave the country or die. He chooses a third option: fight.

Structurally The Way of the Dragon operates a lot like Lee’s previous films. We have our hero, Tang, who is the best warrior around (at least for the sake of the story). A gang of criminals is operating a nefarious enterprise and, after initially being held back, Tang comes in and mops the floors with the bad guys. From there things escalate, on and on, with more and more violence happening on both sides, until such time as our hero takes the fight all the way up to the big boss to end the feud once and for all. Tang is a different guy from Lee’s previous roles, a quiet dude who is happy to go with the flow instead of the reluctant, rage-filled hero, but otherwise, the template for this story was set two films ago (as well as by an entire genre) and this film doesn’t stray far from what had already been working before.

The film, though, is willing to go broader and goofier to appeal to a wider audience. The first act of the film, before the fighting even gets going, sees Lee’s Tang flying in from Hong Kong, having a number of awkward (but funny) encounters, all before finally ending up at the restaurant. It’s an amusing collection of scenes all used to paint Tang as a likable, nice lead. This stands, of course, in contrast to the violence he’s able to unleash, but that’s for a reason. The film wants you to like Tang, to view him as a hero (and not just a vigilante) so that when he does decide to fight back there’s no question about whether what he’s doing is right or not. He’s the hero, the good guy, and the whole first act (silly as it is) does the work to establish that.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the first two acts of the film. It had a bit of fun, it kept things light, and it moved the story forward. The action was there to spice up the story, and everything moved at a solid clip. Weirdly it was when the film kicked into its third act, and became all about the action, that it actually started to bore me. Don’t get me wrong, the action on its own was pretty solid, it’s just that the story completely fell away at this point and it became one action set piece after another with little in the way of connective tissue.

The best fight certainly is the bout between Lee’s Tang and Chuck Norris’s Colt, a character basically serving the same purpose as Robert Baker’s Petrov in Fist of Fury. Colt is the skilled white guy fighter who proves to be the first real challenge Lee’s character fights in the movie, and he’s also the climactic last battle for Lee’s hero. Norris, a champion karate fighter, got his breakthrough role here, and he acquitted himself well, proving to be a strong, fast, capable warrior. His speed and strength hold up well against Lee’s, and the two clearly can battle each other far better than when Lee had to take on any of the earlier character actors in the movie. Those battles felt fake by comparison.

With that said, Colt is a superfluous character brought in simply so Tang could have a harder fight at the end. This is in stark contrast to The Big Boss where Lee’s character’s last fight was against the titular villain. Had Colt been in the film from the beginning (instead of arriving in the story near the end) then that would be different. He’d be someone that we saw, someone built up to be a tougher, harder fight and we’d anticipate the confrontation. He feels tacked on here, though, and it would have been better to have any of the other villainous characters (including the boss of the criminal organization) as the final battle instead. The fight is good, the development is not.

Frankly, the last act of this film feels more like a video game (before fighting games were really a thing) than a film. Lee defeats a gang of goons, so here are two medium skill warriors for him to battle. When he defeats them, the movie then has him battle against Chuck Norris (who feels more like a meme at this point, considering his career after this movie). It’s like “Capcom’s Italy Fighter, featuring Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.” Time has made this battle seem sillier than it was back during its release (especially when you consider this was the last film from Bruce Lee that would be seen internationally, and that didn’t involve shemping in other actors for Lee, or splicing in extra footage). Something about this whole last act just doesn’t quite work.

I didn’t hate The Way of the Dragon. Overall I think the film has plenty of merit. But it does feel like a retread of a retread in many ways. Bruce Lee’s fighting was second to none for the era, but when it came to story he got caught in a loop of telling the same kind of tale over and over and over again. It’s fun to watch, sure, but the more variants we see of this same formula, the less impact each successive work has.