Birth of the Dragon  must have been painful to watch for die-hard Bruce Lee fans, and many people gave it terrible reviews on the basis that it was nothing like the films that made Bruce Lee a legend. I wasn’t raised on Bruce Lee films and have never really taken the time to study him so I had no expectations going into  watching the film. To the annoyance of many, Birth of the Dragon  portrayed Lee as flashy and confident almost to the point of rudeness; from what I’ve heard however, this might actually be pretty close to the truth, especially when Lee was younger.

The weirdest part about Birth of the Dragon was that Bruce Lee and his rival, Wong Jack Man, took back seats in the plot to Steve McKee, a white student of Lee who falls in love with a woman from a Chinatown restaurant run by a Chinese-American crime syndicate. The plot, which one assumes would revolve around martial arts and the feud between Wong Jack Man and Bruce Lee, takes a sort of left turn when it begins to focus on Mckee and his love interest. I’m not necessarily saying that this way of doing the movie was a bad choice by the director, I just think it might have been a bit uncalled for. On one hand  the film through Mckee’s perspective gives Lee and Man an opening to explain the mentalities and styles of their two branches of Kung Fu to an audience who might not have otherwise understood what was going on but it also serves to distract us from the development of the two martial artists and make them seem like one-dimensional background characters in a martial arts-themed love story.

In general the movie was just a little too out of touch to make an impact, the acting wasn’t bad, the fights were good, and even the plot had some redeeming points, but none of it was what I would consider great. The fact that the role of main character was split between Lee, Man, and a random white dude was my least favorite part. I think that the white protagonist with no real reason to be there served to unintentionally erase Lee and Man’s human aspects causing them to be fixtures in another character’s story about themselves.