Ah, the final movie of a quarter filled with memorable and historically relevant flicks. That’s a lot of pressure to live up to, no doubt, and going into Birth of The Dragon I didn’t have a huge amount of expectation. Maybe a laugh or two, hopefully some background on Asian American culture and, if I’m lucky, some quality performances.

Unfortunately for me (and all of us really), only one of those hopes managed to deliver, and even it was lukewarm. Here’s the problem with Birth of the Dragon, a movie centered around the birth of Kung Fu in America and the tale of Bruce Lee, it’s most popular teacher: it’s not about Bruce Lee. It’s not even about Kung Fu. The movie, at the end of the day, is about what most box-office fodder is about; white men saving the day and scoring chicks. Now don’t get me wrong; if that’s what you’re into I have no judgement. But instead of a biopic that helped relay the tale of Lee and Wong Jack Man during an especially racially charged time in our history, we get a self-insert character, Steve McKee, who is given the majority of screentime, character development and relevance. Bruce Lee plays a prominent role, no doubt, but we fail to see any satisfying development within him. If this was the “Birth of the Dragon”, where the heck was the birth??

I’m reminded a bit of the sludgefest that was 2015’s “Stonewall”, an attempt at showcasing what is considered the birth of LGBTQ+ resistance following the Stonewall Riots in NYC. Instead of featuring any prominent real life figures like Marsha P. Johnson or Silvia Rivera, “Stonewall” featured manufactured twink “Danny Winters” (really) as the central character, and subsequently had him play the role of gay liberator in the place of black transwomen. Sure, “BotD” isn’t as erasing as “Stonewall”, but it still shifts focus from POC to whites in a way that clearly is meant to make us care more about them than the people the movie is actually about.

To say nothing of the inaccuracies featured within the movie itself – at one point Cantonese was being spoken, as a classmate pointed out, but subtitles insisted they were “speaking Mandarin”. It’s this kind of oversight that I feel really makes Birth feel so flat. Any real relevence it might have lent to Lee’s story is snuffed out by poor storytelling and a lack of focus on why Lee and Wong are in conflict in the first place. In the end, I’d say I enjoyed this movie for what it was, but sadly what it was did not add up to a whole lot.