Jason Scott Lee does a great job of portraying Bruce Lee and it's a shame that we can't see more of him these days. You can really feel the power of his performance on the screen. If you have any interest in Bruce Lee, you have to check out this film. It's sure to inspire you to reach for your own impossible dreams.


The Legendary Bruce Lee   October 6, 2000
Thomas Yan Ong (Azusa, CA)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful

This is a great film of the legend of Bruce Lee. It's not an acurate portrayal of his life, but it's still a great movie. The fights scenes in the movie were awesome. Jason Scott Lee does a great job imitating Bruce's style and mannerisms. It also accurately showed us the racism involved at the time directed at the Chinese. Although Bruce Lee was a great man with great ambitions and accomplishments, he wasn't as friendly as the film depicts him to be. At times Bruce Lee was a bit arrogant and very strong minded and the movie fails to show us that, except when he seemingly temporarily loses his mind argueing with Linda Lee played by Lauren Holly. Anyway, I love this movie and I love the legend of Bruce Lee, so I reccommend this to any one interested in action movies, Bruce Lee, and inspirational movies. If you love this film I also recommend movies like "Fist of Fury", "The Chinese Connection", "Return of The Dragon", "Enter The Dragon", and "Rapid Fire". If you want to know more about the real Bruce Lee, I reccomend "The Curse Of the Dragon", it has pictures, interviews with people who knew Bruce Lee, a special but short interview with Brandon Lee, and film excerpts.


Another great DVD reissue that does justice to the format.   February 13, 2000
D. Mok (Los Angeles, CA)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful

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.


Not a documentary, just a great movie!!!!   June 22, 2004
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

Director Rob Cohen intended this movie to be an entertaining and thought-provoking homage to Bruce Lee and his wife Linda, not a historical re-enactment. As such, the movie only follows the outlines of the real Bruce and Linda Lee story. And the movie is definitely as much about Linda as it is about Bruce. It is as stirring a love story as any other put onto the big screen in recent times.

For all those hyper-Bruce Lee fans who have panned this movie, I have just one thing to tell you - watch the DVD version with the Director's Commentary turned on. You might learn a thing or two about the real Bruce Lee story. Yes, Rob Cohen's commentary track is worth it all by itself to get this DVD, because he discusses many of the changes made in the movie from the real story, and explains why he made the changes. He doesn't have time to explain everything, but he covers a lot (e.g., the deletion of Seattle from the storyline came about because the Univ. of Washington pissed him off with their refusal to allow him to film on campus, so he just scratched out the entire city and changed it to San Francisco). Along the way, he throws in a number of little historical gems, pointing out things in the movie that might have been put in for dramatic effect but in fact really did happen (e.g., Linda's mother making the comment to her about "having yellow babies" - Linda's mother, who was still alive, actually signed a release to allow herself to be portrayed this way).

Anyway, here's why this movie is great:

1. It is one of the first of the few major Hollywood movies ever made that depict an interracial love story of a Chinese/Caucasian couple where the Chinese person in the story is a MAN. Even today, Hollywood still seems to be much more comfortable with putting cute Chinese women matched with Caucasian leading men onto the big screen.

2. The movie really emphasizes the racial discrimination aspect of the Bruce Lee story, for example, bringing out to the general public the real story behind how David Carradine got the TV show "Kung Fu" (Carradine became very defensive about this part of his acting resume after this movie came out). Cohen dwells on this racism aspect more so than either Linda or Bruce Lee ever did in real life. Most likely, they preferred to ignore the racism and rise above it rather than draw attention to it. It's great that themes like this finally get explored in movies.

3. Jason Scott Lee is terrific. He's bigger and buffer than the real Bruce Lee (who at 5' 7" was shorter than my teenage daughter) And he's a better actor. And no, he's not as quick as the real Bruce Lee, but few people ever were, and for somebody not trained in the martial arts, he sure did a great job of faking it. Unfortunately, since this movie, Jason seems to have undergone a Bruce Lee experience of his own - after making a few more major movies, his career has started to fade from the big screen as more "authentic" and bankable (in the Asian market anyway) Chinese actors such as Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat take over Hollywood's slot for Asian leading men.

4. The soundtrack by Randy Edelman is terrific (if somewhat repetitious). One of the most beautiful parts of the movie was the scene where Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly go through their balletic kung-fu excercises in perfect unison to Edelman's stirring score.

5. Lauren Holly is terrific. She too is a Hollywood improvement on the original. For one thing, in the movie, although she cuts her hair short after marriage, just like the real Linda Lee, her hair never takes on the 60's - era puffed bun look of the original Linda Lee (geez, was there ever a more horrible hairstyle than the puffed bun). For another, her role is much more aggressive and pro-active, more of a proto-feminist from the 90's. The ending of this movie makes it seem as if she was close to leaving Bruce Lee to return to the U.S., whereas the real truth was that Bruce Lee at the time was already traveling back and forth to the U.S. as well as all over the world, and it would have been far more likely that he would have been the one to spin out of her orbit as he scaled the heights of international superstardom.

This is not just a movie about Bruce Lee, it is a great and moving love story. Listen to Director Rob Cohen again as he talks about the final scene in this movie, when Jason Scott Lee gives a good-bye kiss to Lauren Holly and then climbs up the stairs to the Han Island movie set:

"When I look at this scene, no matter how many times, I still get choked up.... Part of it is that how much these people loved each other. Part of it was how beautiful they were together, and what a stand they made for their time. Part of it is that, as he's finishing this film, he's finishing his life, and we know it and he doesn't.....I wanted to give the homage of his fellow martial artists to the great image, the great work, the great place in history of Bruce Lee....to see him again, mythically, legendarily, above and eternal, in motion, never stopping, always kinetic, and always with us."


This is a STORY, not a BIOGRAPHY!   January 25, 2000
Philip Wright (Sacramento, California)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

To those who slammed this movie: you missed the point.

This is a wonderful story. It was endorsed by his family! It is a Bruce Lee movie about Bruce Lee. As such, the overly dramatic fight scenes pay a tribute to his film legacy. This movie simply attempts to introduce the public to the legend using his own style of film; it doesn't try to squash his entire lifetime into a 2 hour movie. That would be like trying to contain a nuclear blast within a shoebox.

What the nay-sayers neglected to mention is the commentary audio track with the director. If you watch it, you will see that they tell the REAL story about his back injury, among other things. There are also stories about the making of the movie that attest to the power of Bruce Lee's impact on the world. The commentary track alone is worth the price of the DVD. (Did I mention the many other DVD extras?)

I've read Bruce's books. I've visited his grave in Seattle. I know his real story. And I applaud the movie for paying tribute to his life and his style of film.

So get over yourselves. This is a great movie by any standard. "It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory." -Bruce Lee