A Tacky, Unnecessary Resurrection

I get the desire, I really do. Bruce Lee died in 1973, leaving behind an unfinished film that could never be completed. While filming Game of Death, the actor signed a deal with Warner Bros. to star in Enter the Dragon, which would be his first, big, American film after years of trying to get the lead role in an American production. That was too tempting for the star to pass up (and rightly so), meaning production on Game of Death had to be paused. Concorde Productions and Golden Harvest let the action go off to make Enter the Dragon, expecting him to return after to finish Game of Death. That, of course, didn’t happen.

What to do, though, with the footage that had been shot? Bruce Lee was gone and the companies had, in effect, the last Bruce Lee movie sitting in cans, waiting for some way to finish them. The decision was made to bring on Robert Clouse, who had previously directed Enter the Dragon (and, in the years since, had directed quite the catalog of martial arts films). The producers wanted to be able to sell the last Bruce Lee movie ever made. In retrospect, this was the wrong call.

Game of Death is awful, in large part because it feels like a morbid, tacky way to resurrect the late actor. The issue with trying to complete Game of Death was that Lee had barely begun work on the film before heading off to make Enter the Dragon. There was 100 minutes of footage shot, but most of that was from the climactic final fight of the film. For films, you record way more than you need, so 100 minutes of footage really only totalled about 15 minutes of usable material. That’s a far cry from the minimum of 90 minutes needed to make Game of Death into an actual, real film. So what could the producers do?

Why, use obvious body doubles, and a lot of terrible dubbing, that’s what? The film does technically feature Bruce Lee as lead character Billy Lo, but it’s really more accurate to say that Kim Tai-jong, Yuen Biao, and Albert Sham physically play Billy Lo, while Chris Kent provides Billy's dubbed voice, and for a few action scenes Bruce Lee plays the stunt double. This is not a Bruce Lee film in any effective way. It’s a reel of unused Bruce Lee action footage that was then strung together with a lot of other dudes acting as Lee’s “fake Shemp” to get a story together. It is, without a doubt, an awful experience.

In the film, Billy Lo (Tai-jong, Baio, Sham, and occasionally Lee) is approached by a representative of the Syndicate, Steiner (Hugh O'Brian), because the organization (a racketeering group operating out of Hong Kong) wants to bring Lo into their group (for reasons that really aren’t made entirely clear). Lo rejects their “offer”, and they threaten him saying he’ll be sorry. He rejects them again, so Steiner goes to his boss, Dr. Land (Dean Jagger), and the boss order’s Lo’s assassination to send a message to everyone else in the industry: play ball or die.

While filming one of his movies (using Fist of Fury footage of Lee for the stand-in moment), Lo is shot by one of Steiner’s goons. Lo, recovering in the hospital, decides to fake his own death, letting them world think he’s dead. This is mostly to protect his fiancee, Ann Morris (Colleen Camp), so the Syndicate doesn’t go after her. But when Lo comes out of hiding to take out some of the Syndicate's goons (as a way to start his own campaign of revenge against those who tried to kill him) they catch on that Lo isn’t really dead. They kidnap Ann and hold her hostage threatening to kill her if Lo doesn’t give himself up. Lo is going to have to find a way to save the girl, and himself, before everything he cares about dies.

Game of Death is a mess of a film and that’s because the filmmakers had to basically work backwards from what footage existed of Lee and then make some kind of movie, and story, that could fit in and around that footage. This is, of course, the opposite way of doing things normally, where a film goes from script, to filming, to editing, to reshoots (if need be) to fill in footage missing. Footage was already shot, and this was the stuff that couldn’t be abandoned since Lee wasn’t coming back to finish the work. Everything else had to be made to fit around it, however weird or awkward that would become.

And it is weird and awkward. Very much so. It’s obvious, from one scene to the next, what parts were filmed by Bruce Lee and what bits feature some other actor filling in as Billy Lo. Lo spends most of the film in shadows, or seen from behind, or under thick bandages, all so we never see his face (so we don’t know it’s not Bruce Lee). The few times we actually see Lo as played by Lee, it’s either in footage taken from other movies (Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon), or footage shot for the climax of this film, or, most ghoulishly, footage from Lee’s actual funeral. There’s tacky, and then there’s using the actor’s own funeral procession as footage for the film you’re trying to finish without his consent. It was wrong.

But even if you somehow don’t care about how awkward it is to try and stitch together this film when so little of it actually features the named actor given top billing, it’s still hard to ignore the fact that this film is just bad. The story doesn’t really make much sense – why does a crime syndicate want an actor? – and the film absolutely drags this story out to fill time and hit feature length. People talk back and forth to each other, over and over, about what Lo should do, but very little actually happens until the 40 minute mark. It’s only then that Lo is “assassinated”, sent to the hospital to recover from facial injuries, and then comes out to hunt down the men that tried to kill him. And even then there’s a lot of waiting until we finally get to any fight sequence worth watching.

Tai-jong, Baio, and Sham may be fine performers but it’s hard for us to know in this awkwardly made movie. The film isn’t about them or their performances. They have as much to do here as a propped up mannequin. The few times one of these fighters actually gets to perform, you quickly realize why they were kept in the shadows this whole time: they aren’t Bruce Lee. The actor was more than his looks; he was his charisma, and his personality, and his fighting prowess, and all of that is missing for massive chunks of this film. The movie isn’t able to support itself without him.

The one time it really does come alive is when we switch (almost entirely) to the footage of Lee filmed for the climax. This is a sequence where Lo climbs a tower (which, in this movie is implied to exist as the upper floors of a restaurant), fighting one powerful combatant after another (including Kareen Abdul Jabar) and, man, this whole set of battles is brilliant. Watching Lee go toe-to-toe with great fighters never gets old, nor does footage of Lee lose any of its magic all these years later. But this sequence only highlights how bland and dull the rest of the film is by comparison. This isn’t enough to elevate the film, it just underscores the fact that there wasn’t much film here to begin with, certainly not enough to make a real movie out of it.

Game of Death is bad. It’s bad in a way that few films can achieve. It’s terrible because it tries to sell itself on the legacy of an actor that had died, who had left almost no footage behind that could be used to finish a film he’d barely started. The producers should have known there was no way to replace Lee, that it would have been obvious from the start that Bruce Lee was barely in this “Bruce Lee Movie”. But they wanted that last, quick buck off the actor, one more time trotting him out for audiences, so they reanimated his corpse any way to get the job done.

The resulting “movie” is awful. Worse, though, it does a disservice to Bruce Lee and his legacy. He should have been able to go out on Enter the Dragon, a far better film that at least showcased everything the actor could do. Instead the ghouls behind this movie ruined that, creating this abomination to make one last dollar off Lee’s name. It’s the worst kind of film I can think of, a bad movie made for bad reasons without the consent of the lead actor at the center of it all.