It's not Dragon Lee's first movie. Not even close. It's more like his 15th! So Bruce Lee's Way of Kung Fu could be accurately described as the midway marker of Dragon's big screen career. Which had me puzzling: Why do the credits list him as "Bruce Lei"? Was the allure of Bruce Lee that great six years after the movie icon's death? Or was Dragon ashamed of this particular pic? One fact is clear: This movie has nothing to do with the late Bruce Lee or his singular technique. So the title is doubly misleading: No Bruce Lee, no Bruce Lee moves. What do you get instead?
A surly king has a cadre of kung fu babes who defend him against a series of male martial artists; over 700 have died so far according to the blind codger who works as the local coffin-maker. If anyone would know, he would! According to the wise one, Dragon Lee — in Mowgli garb and a pageboy haircut — is the first guy to go into the palatial caves and come out alive. Barely. I mean, he gets his ass whupped in a cave, on a beach, in the forest, and in the ocean. Amid these various landscapes, our hero is subject to fishing nets, steel coils, and dart-throwing fans. Maybe Dragon chose the pseudonym for this flick because he didn't like getting beat up so much. As one character tell him fairly late in the movie, "Your only weakness was you didn't have the strength." That's pretty damning in a martial arts movie.
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