Game of Death

Don't be misguided by my tag line, but the last 15 or 20 minutes of this movie are worth of keeping Bruce Lee fighting Kareem Abdul Jabbar in the pagoda is a thing of beauty, the stand ins and an overclothed and irritating Collen Camp are laughable and unnecessary. Check out Sammo Hung in one of his early appearances."Bruce's" fight scene with Bob Wall is vastly underrated. Not a bad movie.

The sad:

Bruce's premature death, the disposal of the original script, the inclusion of the current one, the cop-out ending, "Bruce's" punking out...

The Funny:

The double used through mist if the film meant to be passed off as Bruce Lee, the blatant use of stock footage from other Bruce films, the acting...

The enjoyable:

The score is very underrated, one of John Barry's finest (I have the soundtrack to this movie, along with another Barry film, Night Games.) Some real good martial arts sequences make the wait for the real Bruce footage towards the end, especially the locker room fight between "Bruce" and Bob Wall (choreaographed by Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, who reportedly portrayed Bruce in that scene.) Sammo himself appears as a fighter in the film. I give this movie a modest recommendation.

lee didn't manage to finish this film but director robert clouse (of e.t.dragon fame) manages to pick up the pieces left behind and make a film out of it which is where the film falls down. you see they had to bring in stunt doubles to replace Lee so everytime he's wearing shades or has his back to you you just know that it's not really lee. for the scene in which lee is shot they reused scenes from the superb fist of fury(it is sooooo obvious because the colour quality is different)!!! apart from the fun of spotting which scenes lee failed to complete, the changing room scene is fantasticly good fun to watch, your jaw will drop open at lee's two final finishing moves the penultimate kick is compareable to lee's complete bicycle kick in e.t.dragon. overall this film is well worth the mere £5.99 of which it costs in england

'Game of Death' is the equivalent of having your dog swallow a gold ring - you've got to sift through the cr*p to find the polished stuff.

Completely different to Bruce's original vision, the 1978 version is hugely controversial. To some, it's a shameless cash-in and insult, to others it's a curiosity. To me personally, it's a guilty pleasure. Obviously, with such limited footage of Bruce Lee to use, the film was always going to suffer. Not only that, but how do you incorporate the footage into a film and give it context? The stand-in's that are used to fill the time leading up to the Lee footage are never going to fool anyone. Even as a kid, I could tell it someone else. The techniques used to have Bruce Lee on screen range from awful (superimposed heads) to tasteless (his real funeral) to fairly good (quick cuts from old footage). The disguises that Billy Lo and Bruce's doubles wear throughout the film are hokey but nothing that we haven't seen in Lee's films before (Fist of Fury), so that didn't bother me too much.

Despite some awful dubbing and a poor script, 'Game of Death' is still watchable for it's action. Fight choreographer Sammo Hung makes the non-Lee fight scenes entertaining even if the doubles don't match Bruce Lee's speed or technique. However, they do capture some traits of Lee's fights including the slow motion finishing move. Also, the film's budget allows for a number of locations ensuring that Billy's quest for revenge keeps moving. In this regard, the Hollywood frills that are added give the film a degree of watchability, especially the classy score which appears throughout and heightens the final scenes.

But of course, the main point of watching 'Game of Death' is to see Bruce in action. Although criticised for cutting down the "pagoda sequence", I think it still contains enough to satisfy. You have to remember that this original footage included two companions of Lee's who don't feature in the 1978 film, meaning a lot had to be left out. The nunchuk duel is unique while the fight with Kareem Abdul Jabbar is bizarre but thrilling.

There are some moments of bad taste, but on the whole the film is a cheesy and quite fun attempt to build up to the final 20 minutes. Whether you think this was a cash-in or a tribute, you still need to see it in order to understand the 'Game of Death' phenomenon.

Game of Death, Bruce Lee's most ambitious project to date, was designed to fully showcase Jeet Kune Do, the unique, fluid fighting style developed by its star; the story was to revolve around a martial artist's deadly mission to retrieve a valuable object from the top floor of a five storey pagoda, defeating a different foe in order to progress to each new level.

Although filming on Game of Death began shortly after completion of The Way of the Dragon, the production was put on hold when the star was offered the lead role in Warner Brothers' Enter the Dragon. Before the kung fu legend was able to resume work on the project, he had suffered a massive cerebral edema that tragically ended his life.

Bruce's sudden and unexpected death unsurprisingly threw a major spanner in the works of Game of Death: with 40 minutes of test footage and actual fight action in the can, but little else of use, the film sat on the shelf for three years before Enter The Dragon's director Robert Clouse was enlisted to somehow finish the film without the benefit of its main attraction.

Taking the audacious decision to radically alter the script, using 'doubles' to stand in for Bruce in most of the new scenes, Clouse eventually completed the film, which was released in 1978, five years after its star's demise. With Bruce's original storyline replaced by a dumb plot in which martial arts movie star Billy Lo (played by Lee and his stand-ins) is forced to take action against an evil racketeering syndicate that is keen to cash in on his success, and the tasteless inclusion of real footage from Lee's funeral, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that much of the movie is a total mess.

But even though Game of Death is far from the film that Lee had originally envisioned, it is still recommended viewing for kung fu fans thanks to one or two decent scraps amidst the mundane first hour or so (the bout between Sammo Hung's Lo Chen and bad guy Carl Miller, for example, is a lot of fun), excellent production values, a spiffing Bond style score courtesy of John Barry that enhances the action, suitably Bond-like opening credits, the iconic yellow tracksuit, and of course, the existing footage of the legendary pagoda sequence that makes it into the film's finale. It's definitely worth persevering through the poorly edited and exploitative dross featuring badly disguised stand-ins to witness Lee's incredible fight action at the end of the movie, the stand-out scenes being an awesome nunchuk duel and the unforgettable battle between Game of Death's diminutive star and 7'2" basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

It is these undeniably great moments that makes one wonder what might have been if only Bruce had lived to finish what he had started.