Ah, gentle reader. I seed my stacks with things which will only later become imperative. For example, at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library in autumn 2023, I bought this DVD (and thought it was a documentary). And this year, I read Be Water, My Friend by Bruce’s daughter Shannon, which inspired me to watch the Bruce Lee movies I bought in February 2025 (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, and Game of Death II, the last two completed after he died–and the very last made without any footage that Lee shot for the film). So, when I was rifling through the unwatched videos and came across this disc, oh, yeah, I had to watch it and right now.
Although I thought it was a documentary, it is not. It is a fictionalized account of Bruce Lee’s life. And I watched for what seemed a very long time on Saturday night, and I started to wonder if it was a miniseries. Ah, The Legend of Bruce Lee was a Chinese television series. Which explains why every once and a while the music would swell (the theme song sung by Shannon Lee? I cannot find confirmation or refutation of the thesis, but I’m not going to spend an hour on it for a movie review that three people will read, and two of them are mes of the future) after a bit of a climax, but then we’d get another scene starting somewhere else. The Wikipedia for the television series indicates it had seven segments with numerous episodes per segment–50 in all? So I thought on Sunday night I would have another three hours to go since I was but through the fourth segment (the first four being, according to Wikipedia, “High School in Hong Kong”, “Late Adolescence in America”, “College Years and Opening a Kung Fu School”, and “Oakland”). I expected I would need to get through three segments (“Hollywood”, “Rise to Fame in Hong Kong”, and “International Fame and Death”). Oh, but no: This was but a three-hour feature film cut from the whole television series.
Which explains a lot of jumps in the film. Reading the summary, we get jumps from Hong Kong to Seattle–not much of the late Adolescence or Oakland portions (part 2 and part four) if any. It’s a rather simplified version of his story, or at least the highlights from Be Water, My Friend, although Wikipedia’s entry on Bruce Lee includes details that Shannon Lee’s book did not and which might or might not be true. And in the film I watched, not only are Seattle-Oakland-San Francisco blurred, but the last three sections go by very quickly, too–we go from him beating “Yellow Skin,” a lifetime rival who almost paralyzed Lee after a bout. I thought Be Water, My Friend put it on a weightlifting accident, but which is the real story and which is the legend? And right after the swelling music and advanced cinematography which indicated this was A Moment (and perhaps end of a section), we cut to an ambulance and Bruce Lee’s death, and finis! Wait, what?
As it’s a 21st century work, you still get bits of the China versus the West bits that mar 21st century Chinese martial arts films. Some of it probably are apropos, given that parts of the film took place in Hong Kong and Chinatowns in the middle of the 20th century, but the heavy thumb on the scale undercuts the other, more universal, themes in it, an outsider or a man going against the system and trying to improve himself and the world. One of the things that have made Bruce Lee endure as an icon for a small guy beating great odds.
But, eh, you’re probably better off spending time with the actual Bruce Lee films. Especially as Bruce Lee, the man, has been re-written into Bruce Lee, the legend. Which might or might not be true, and for better or for worse depending upon the needs of the moment. At least with the films, you know they’re fictional.
