Enter the Dragon review

Number 583 on the top 1000 films of all time is the martial arts drama Enter the Dragon.

 Lee (Bruce Lee) is an ace martial artist and instructor at the Shaolin Temple. He is approached by the English spy Braithewaite (Geoffrey Weeks) to go on an undercover operation. The objective? To investigate crime lord and former Shaolin Temple student Han. (Shih Kien) Han is suspected of running a human and drug trafficking operation from his own island under the guise of a martial arts competition. Lee is sent to compete. He is aided by the playboy and gambler Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (Jim Kelly) who is on the run after being accosted by racist police.

If there are two types of films I don’t like, it’s action films and martial arts films. Enter the Dragon did not do anything to move the needle. Like many other martial arts, action films I’ve seen, Enter the Dragon was all too cheesy and over-the-top with admittedly well-choregraphed action sequences but rather deftless dialogue.

There have been some who have compared it to a martial arts version of a James Bond film, which would be an apt comparison. Swap the guns for Kung Fu and the suave Sean Connery for the straight forward Lee and it’s almost a spitting image. There was a multitude of unnecessary henchmen and even more unnecessary female characters who didn’t really add anything to the plot. Neither did Williams to be honest except for highlighting how bad the bad guy really was.

Enter the Dragon is regarded as being one of the most influential martial arts films of all time and you could argue that it certainly pioneered the genre in Hollywood. Subsequent Wuxia films like the IP man franchise or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon owe a lot to Enter the Dragon. It would be unfair to criticise it for its martial art sequences, but, while they were all well-choregraphed, they all became a bit tedious after a while. The same could be said for the actual film, which all culminated to a rather damp squib of an ending. It all seemed to be building toward a big bang but instead finished with little more than a whimper. Yes, Han gets his just desserts, but I was expecting something more dramatic.

 Like many of the films on this list, especially the Wuxia and action films, there is a definite audience for films like Enter the Dragon. But I am definitely not part of that audience.