The Real Bruce Lee (1979)

Good concept, poorly executed.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Do not watch this movie in hopes of anything even remotely relevant to Bruce Lee. It is quite obvious that Bruce's name was slapped on to take advantage of his fame directly following his death.Skip ahead to the Dragon Lee movie, and as the film states, "the rest will be history." If you have ever seen any of the Mystery Science Theater films (and enjoyed them), this movie is for you.Everyone should have the opportunity to view this masterpiece. From the horrible camera work to the mismatched sound effects and terrible dubbing laughable fight choreography and attempt at a serious story, this movie holds nothing back.

Clips from Bruce Lee's films he made as a child are followed by a knock off kung fu story without Lee that really isn't very good.I picked this up in the dollar bin and for a buck it was worth it. The opening stuff of Bruce Lee as a child is interesting since you see Lee's charisma even at an early age. Unfortunately the effort to stretch the film into something more falls flat since the non-archival stuff is really dreadful. I found myself scanning through the material hoping for something more that was good but it never came. I paid a buck. It was worth the buck to see the early films. It's not worth any more than that since after the early films is a good deal of really bad material.

There's very little of the "real Bruce Lee" in this film, its title notwithstanding. The brief clips of four of the movies he made as a Hong Kong child star ("Kid Cheung", "Bad Boy", "Carnival", and "Orphan Sam") are mildly interesting, but they don't really have anything to do with Lee's later career as a martial arts practitioner/teacher/writer and kung-fu film luminary. The rest of "The Real Bruce Lee" consists of a handful of clips of Bruce Li, the first and most watchable Lee impersonator, followed by a (way too) long mini-feature which the narrator calls 'The Ultimate Lee'. Said mini-feature stars Dragon Lee, a rather graceless Korean martial artist who was by far the LEAST adept of the three major Bruce Lee imitators! There are no credits for 'The Ultimate Lee', and I suspect that it is an edit of a longer film which has never been seen in its complete form in the United States. It appears to have been shot in Korea, rather than Hong Kong or Taiwan, and the fight choreography is--as in most Dragon Lee films--very clunky. The dubbing and sound effects are standard (which is to say terrible) for a low-budget chopsocky movie. The most laughable thing about 'The Ultimate Lee' is the narrator's claim that it was Bruce Lee's next scheduled project, and that Dragon Lee had to be brought in to replace him! Bruce Lee had already starred in "The Chinese Connection"; he wouldn't have gone anywhere near this sordid, clumsy little ripoff of his own classic film. Avoid.

This movie has all the looks of a quickie movie that was made to capitalize on the death of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong in 1973. I am sure there were many , many movies like this made back then. Luckily for us, this one survives and is dubbed in English. The high points of this 2 hour film which is really a half-hour documentary about Bruce, followed by a full-length Kung Fu feature supposedly called " The Ultimate Lee" and is claimed to be the next scheduled movie was to have done ( yeah, right...). The first half-hour is where this feature shines as we see selected clips from Bruce's first four films made while he was a youngster in China. We see clips from "The Little Dragon", "The Bad Boy", "Carnival" and "Orphan Sam". Included is the only scene Bruce ever did with his father. We see scenes of Bruce behind the camera and casual. We also see scenes of Bruce's funeral. This is all very good and the collector would love to get his hands on footage like this. I will offer a caveat though when seeking this documentary out. Beware of inferior dubs. There is a video copy of this being sold that has Bruce on the cover with no shirt and with the pattern of a rising sun Japanese flag behind him ( strangely enough...), this is an inferior copy that looks like it was copied by a handheld camera with the movie being shown on a flapping sheet. The picture is out of focus a lot of the time and is very frustrating to watch, especially the rarities when you would like to see clearly. But if you can find the clear version, it is worth seeing for the Bruce Lee fan.