1 Year 100 Reviews — Birth of the Dragon
A ONE-INCH PUNCH AWAY FROM BEING FAN-FICTION

I really miss old kung fu movies. Even though legends like Jackie Chan are still making movies, they are not making kung fu movies of the same caliber as they used to. Modern films have employed a lot of editing and filming tricks to fool audiences from the truth: no one is fighting each other on camera. It used to be that these kung fu movies would spent many, many hours perfecting the choreography and taking real hits in order to make as realistic a fight as possible. No quick cuts, reverse shots, or dropped frames were used to mask hits. No shaky cam, dark lighting, or closeups were used to mask the actor’s inability to fight. And the difference is as stark as night and day.
Bruce Lee was a master of the old martial arts style. It is just a shame that the movie based on his life relies on all these modern tricks; it is kind of a disservice to his legacy.
Birth of the Dragon is ostensibly a movie about a controversial fight Lee had with another San Fransisco-based kung fu teacher, Wong Jack Man. I say “ostensibly” because most of the movie focuses on a love story between one of Lee’s American students and a Chinese girl in servitude to a local crime lord. This student is the one who gets Lee to challenge Wong to a fight, gets Wong to accept the fight, gets Lee to win the fight, and pushes all the players into a climactic raid on the crime syndicate for the movie’s climax. Yup, a love story between an American who met a Chinese girl and gave her a couple books is what made Bruce Lee into a legend. And, this romance plot is more benign and cliché than I can possible convey here.
To be fair, the movie has a bit more to it than just this love story. There is a secondary plot surrounding the motives of Lee and Wong in fighting each other. The real-life events of this fight are controversial since both Lee and Wong’s accounts differ greatly. This movie chooses to fictionalize the accounts in order to tell a narrative of an old master humbling a prideful but talented novice. This turns out to be an excellent choice for narrative purposes, but is too far removed from the actual accounts to merit all the reminders that they were based on real events. It would be like Inglorious Basterds claiming their movie was based on real events. Still, Birth of the Dragon offers interesting character arcs for Lee and Wong, despite it all hinging on a Romeo-Juliet love story.
But, what really grinds my gears is how much this movie relies on modern filmmaking tricks to mask the inadequacies of modern martial arts filming. Now, to be fair, the movie is much better than the average blockbuster with regards to these tricks and shortcuts. It is much closer aligned to movies like John Wick and Atomic Blonde than to the Bourne movies or what have you. Still, the actors on screen are actual martial artists who are capable of great feats of fighting. Philip Ng, who plays Bruce Lee, is so fast that the camera shutter speed cannot keep up with his fists. So, why then should the movie rely on camera tricks to make him seem faster? During the Wong/Lee fight, the movie starts using artificial slow motion, quick cuts, and even some Wire-Fu to make the whole thing seem epic. But, these things are distracting from the action and make it feel entirely fake. The Matrix did a better job filming its kung fu.
In the end, the only reason I went to this movie was to watch some awesome martial arts on the big screen. In that regard, Birth of the Dragon mostly delivers. It was not exactly what I had hoped for, but it was still better than most of the action found in modern movies. Still, with such a lame love story at the gravitational center of this movie, the experience was somewhat diminished.
I really wish Netflix had some kung fu movies available right now.