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Rating: Here it is, the classic review that, like an obscuring forest, the radiant cinephile would never want to encounter in the middle of their journey. Abandoning the straight path of the reassuring latest Netflix series, famous even before the time of ovaries, the true path of the multi-decorated latest creation from the Greek director with an impossible plot and an unpronounceable name.
There’s no point beating around the bush, "The Last Fight of Chen" manages to touch some of the lowest points in the world’s cinematic history, competing with some of Uwe Boll’s films in suburban derbies on scorching and pest-ridden courts.
Never has a work revealed itself to be so impure in realization compared to the original conception.
Yet.
But at the same time, in the total chaos of those stand-ins scattered on the set who didn’t resemble Lee in the slightest, of soulless characters and villains who come and go as if within the eternal walls of a boudoir, everything is intoxication from a compulsive manifesto of Jeet Kune Do, of the Art of the fight but also Philosophy of contemplation, which silently screws you and the next day you rush to order from your favorite store a set of octagonal wooden nunchaku with special offer JockStrap & Vaja con Dios.
Or that timeless yellow motorcycle suit with black stripes, iconic and good for all seasons, which makes your body sexy and sanctified like the hips of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill...that second skin that naturally arises after that pain, that congenital suffering that creates resilience. Just like that envisioned opening shot of the film, that Jeet Kune Do in a nutshell, with the image of that small bamboo tree scattered and bent by the storm, bending without breaking.
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Posthumous work that in its incompleteness reveals that touch of divine incompleteness, that summation of Lee’s martial philosophical thought dissolved in celestial threads before touching earth…
Game of Death and its mystery, that game of Death, which yearns to determine the projects and the hereditary line of the Lee family, first Bruce then Brandon, it takes little to win or lose the bank. A mere “proven” hypersensitivity to a headache medicine is enough to lay out a Dragon, as on the mysterious day of Lee’s death at actress Betty Ting Pei’s home in 1973.
All it takes is a stray bullet in Brandon Lee’s abdomen in 1993.
Just like in one of the first shots of Game of Death filmed in 1973 where Bruce Lee/Billy Lo is fatally wounded during an assassination attempt while shooting “Fists of Fury.”
Et voilà with a leap into metacinema served on the plateau the misadventure of the Lee family, in that melange of autopsies, inspections, mysteries, and...conspiracies, that invasive magic capable of shaking 5 years later that film from the deep squalor to which it seemed inexorably destined.
It's the preparation that meets opportunity; you can never call the wind but you can leave the window open.
Be water my friend.
With the screenplay in shambles, after those 5 years of rethinkings by Golden Harvest, after having filmed with a dozen stand-ins without finding a half-decent one, director Bob Clouse in an alcoholic coma decides to desecrate even the Myth, inserting real footage of Lee’s funeral in the film, with an open casket perhaps to avoid finding another (dead) stand-in.
Then suddenly something angelic/mephistophelian takes over, perhaps the spirit of Lee descending from celestial cosmos, takes possession of the set and silences everyone and suddenly the direction eclipses in a psychedelic trip, with the beating scene in the factory on motorcycles with the neon suits.
The rhythm grows intensely in a vortex of blows and colors up to the zenith of the challenge with the martial masters in the pagoda, one duelist per floor, a boss increasingly badass to face on the upper floor, exactly like in the logic of console beat 'em ups, even in this juncture for that strange mystery ahead of its times… And finally, here are those eternal 10 minutes of duels, of contemplating the opponent, the epistemic ascent in the pagoda, the start of the long journey of abstraction of knowledge to glimpse those scraps of reality, that ultrasensitive reality, where Lee's body movements are so rapid that they are captured by the camera light only partially. In that hyperuranium the form is surpassed; l’enfer c’est les autres and the real struggle is against the standardization of thought, the thought is projected towards the future, oh yes sometimes uncomfortable.
After that delirious dinner, slow and unexpected, comes the magical dessert.
Those final combat scenes, the epistemic ascent, with two excellent choreographers like Lee and Sammo Hung, with the final climax of the duel with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; the most complicated test, the pupil vs the master; those body muscles taut and symbols and expression of a thought, of a political idea, of a way of acting.
Chen's scream then continued to terrify the West.
Provided duties allow.
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