The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Film: The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Tony Liu, Chuck Norris

Director: Bruce Lee

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said when I kicked off this month, trying to get a gage on Bruce Lee's stardom is really challenging.  After Lee's time in the United States making The Green Hornet, his presence in the United States, specifically, is extremely challenging to timeline.  This is best-evidenced by The Way of the Dragon, which was a massive hit in 1972, at the time becoming the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history, and becoming a behemoth at the US box office, making $5 million during its initial run and at one point becoming the number one movie in America.  By the spring of 1973, Bruce Lee was a major Hollywood box office star, at this point approaching actors like Brigitte Bardot & Sophia Loren in the previous decade as the rare actor who could open a subtitled film in the United States.  His next few films would be highly anticipated, and they would indeed make a lot of money in the US...but they would happen after Lee's death.  Bruce Lee would die just seven months after the lauded release of The Way of the Dragon.

(Spoilers Ahead) This makes The Way of the Dragon, the only film Lee made during his lifetime that he had complete creative control over, a very special film in his filmography, and I will note right off of the bat that it reads as quite distinctive.  The movie is about Tang Lung (Lee) a young martial artist who comes to Rome and struggles to acclimate to the new culture, feeling less cosmopolitan than his frequent companion Chen (Miao), a weirdly beautiful woman who, for all intents-and-purposes, is not Tang Lung's love interest; there is little indication, other than a mild flirtation toward the end, than what would've been assumed from a female lead in an action film in this era (i.e. she's there to fall in love with the hero) is part of The Way of the Dragon, and this is partially because, as we see as the film progresses with Tang Lung's connection to a restaurant that a mob boss is trying to take over, he's meant to be a loner, someone who cannot handle this modern world and must walk the earth solo.

This sounds better than what it is, mostly because The Way of the Dragon is (tonally) a bizarre movie.  Part of this is trying to parcel through an over fifty-year-old film, one that wasn't originally in English, but one that has a very distinctive set of humor.  The first twenty minutes it's important to know that Tang Lung is something of a country bumpkin (which I didn't catch at first...I just thought he was odd), but even with that context, the fact that action legend Bruce Lee's only full directorial effort includes multiple (I think it happens three, possibly four times) moments of him insinuating that he needs to defecate because he ate an aggressive amount of soup at an airport restaurant, is as strange as it sounds.

The movie doesn't work because of these shifts, and a lot of bizarre plot twists that feel like the script was being written as the movie was being made, but it does include a truly incredible action sequence at the end of the picture.  In 1972, Chuck Norris (who would go on to actual Hollywood fame with the success of Walker, Texas Ranger and then meme infamy for decades to come afterward) was best-known as a karate world champion, which would spark debate (that Norris would occasionally prod, despite a friendship with Lee) in the years that followed over whether or not Lee would've defeated Norris in an actual fight...in the film he kills him, in a one-on-one battle in the actual Colosseum (yes, you read that right...Lee managed to bribe his way into having one of the most legendary battles in the history of martial arts films in the actual fighting arena of ancient Romans).  This scene is stupendous...it's just that the rest of the film doesn't live up to it, insisting on humor & oftentimes soap opera-esque approaches when really...all you need is two action stars duking it out to the death in the most famous places on Earth.