Game of Death (1978)

Game of Death (1978), the posthumous Bruce Lee film, has to be the ultimate in 'Brucesploitation'.  While presented as a tribute to the late martial arts star, incorporating footage shot by Lee for his own never completed and unreleased film of the same name, in truth it is just as exploitative as other entries in the genre, which invoked Lee's name in an attempt to wring more money from fans of the star.  In reality, the film includes only eleven minutes or so of new footage of Lee, which comprises the story's climax, with doubles elsewhere standing in for Lee, (with the occasional cutaway shot of Lee taken from one of his earlier films).  Unfortunately, neither of the two doubles actually looked that much like Lee, (most of the doubles used in those cheapskate 'Brucespoitation' films were actually better matches), let alone moved or fought like him.  This issue is addressed in various ways, most notably, part way through the film the 'Lee' character fakes his own death and has plastic surgery to fix a facial wound, he then adopts a series of disguises to pursue his revenge plot against the villains.  This concept rather falls apart when, for the climax, he's suddenly the real Bruce Lee, who he was meant to look like before the surgery - we know this because in one notorious scene early on, one of the doubles is seen from behind looking into a mirror, which has a picture of Lee's face pasted onto it, covering the actor's face in his reflection.  

While the plot of Lee's version of the film involved his character leading a team of martial artists trying to retrieve a stolen treasure from the top floor of a multi-storey pagoda, with each floor guarded by hostile martial artists, the 1978 film substitutes a much more mundane plot involving a martial arts star in Hong Kong being threatened by the mob, who want to force him to sign up to their agency.  The various convolutions of this plot eventually lead to Lee's character having to fight his way past several martial arts masters guarding each floor of a restaurant (which looks remarkably like a pagoda inside) in order to reach the Mafia boss on the top floor.  As noted, this is mostly genuine Lee footage from the unfinished film, intercut with new footage toward the end to give the impression that he is fighting the mob bosses played by Hugh O'Brien and Dean Jagger.  Nothing that precedes this footage in the film has anything like the same quality, not even the immediately preceding motorcycle fight in the warehouse, where one of Lee's doubles, face hidden by a motorcycle helmet, rescues his character's girlfriend.  Amazingly, though, despite the fact that the whole film assembled from a mixture of newly shot footage with a new cast and the existing Bruce Lee footage, Robert Clouse's direction actually feels smoother than usual, with the finished product, surprisingly, lacking the rough edged and slightly scrappy look and feel of many of his other movies.

Clouse had, of course, directed Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973), the last film the actor completed before his death, (he died prior to its release), an action thriller backed by a US studio which was on a scale and with production values far in excess of his previous films.  Enter the Dragon incorporated elements of Bond-style spy thrillers alongside the martial arts, giving it a far more 'Westtern' feel and Game of Death is clearly trying to emulate its style, from an imposing John Barry musical score to some very Bond-like opening and closing credits.  But this simply emphasises the fact that it isn't really a Bruce Lee film, but rather a fairly generic action-crime-thriller movie incorporating some Bruce Lee footage.  The star's absence from the majority of the film leaves a vacuum at its centre, with his doubles proving poor substitutes for Lee's charisma and onscreen presence.  The fact that the viewer knows that the supposed star of the film had been dead some five years before its release gives the whole thing the feel of a mausoleum - dank, sombre and somewhat depressing. Such an impression isn't helped by the questionable decision to incorporate footage of Lee's actual, open casket, funeral procession for his character's fake funeral.  Seeing the film now, the whole sub-plot leading to his character's fake death - the mob tries to assassinate him in an on-set 'accident' involving a real bullet being fired at him from a prop gun - feels like an ominous foreshadowing of his son Brandon Lee's actual death on the set of The Crow.

The end credits play put over a montage of Lee's greatest fight scenes (mainly from Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon) and while this constitutes a fitting tribute, these sequences simply emphasise how inadequate most of the action in Game of Death has been.  There is something quite distinctive in the way Lee moved and conducted his action scenes that his doubles simply couldn't match.  This footage effectively proved that there really was only one Bruce Lee and that attempts to imitate or recreate him would always fall short.