Sometimes film distributors really know how to screw things up. In the strange world of alternate titles, where the very name of a movie can be changed in an attempt to sell a film to a foreign market (hence Godzilla once being called Gigantis and Italian zombie flicks coming with more aliases than a secret agent), surely America’s treatment of Bruce Lee’s sophomore punch slinger, Fist Of Fury, is one of the most confusing. You see, due to a careless snafu, Lee’s first movie, The Big Boss, was renamed Fists Of Fury in the States, so when Fist Of Fury came out, the guys in charge simply shrugged and renamed it The Chinese Connection for no real reason other than The French Connection doing some big business.
Still, Shakespear once wrote “what’s in a name?” and the fact of the matter is, that no matter what you call Fist Of Fury, it still kicks serious amount of ass.
It’s 1908 and prized student Chen Zhen returns to his Chinese martial arts school in Shanghai with the intention to marry his sweetheart Yuan Li’er, only to find that his beloved master, Huo Yuanjia has suddenly died to to a mystery illness. So say that Chen is distraught is something of an understatement as it takes the flat end of a shovel to stop the sheer hysteria of his grief, however, once he wakes up, more trouble is on the horizon when representatives of a local, Japanese dojo arrives to mock the Chinese at their time of mourning.
Chen, obviously, isn’t going to take any of that shit lying down and so storms off to confront everybody at the dojo to a fight at the same time and struts out victorious mopping the floor with over twenty dudes. However, as truly satisfying as it must have been to make the Japanese bullies eat both their words and his fists, Chen’s rash act sets of a chain reaction of escalating retaliation that finally reveals the dastardly truth: Huo Yuanjia was poisoned by moles at the school working for the dojo.
If Chen was incensed before, he’s on fucking fire now and thus goes into hiding after embarking on a spot of murder to try and gain a measure of revenge. However, despite beating two guilty men to death and hanging their bodies up from lamp posts as a warning, Chen finds that violent revenge is much like eating an entire tube of Pringles – once you pop, you can’t stop – and so after donning a bunch of disguises to infiltrate the dojo and avoid the police, he is poised to make his move.
However, while blinded by rage, Chen hasn’t taken into account that no matter what happens, he and the members of his school are going to fall foul of Japanese Colonialism and the law is horribly biased against them, so the harder the rampaging martial artist pushes and the more victims his bludgeons into oblivion, the tougher things become for his loved ones.
So, before we get into the real nitty gritty of Bruce Lee’s second, cinematic step toward pop culture immortality, I guess we’d better get the unavoidable matter of the movie’s race politics out of the way. Now, how can I put this, you know how the English are portrayed in Braveheart, The Patriot and Rob Roy? Well, that’s how the Japanese are handled in this film as the whole shebang is kicked off by the the bullying acts of foreign aggressors that soon segues into murder, violence and the odd fact that our hero seems to think that hanging his guilty victims in the middle of the street like the fucking Predator isn’t going to make him look like a deranged maniac. This being a Kung-Fu movie, it handles sensitive issues the way Kung-Fu movies generally handles everything in the 70’s, but once you accept that Fist Of Fury is dead set in handling sensitive matters with a typically pugilistic attitude, you can settle down to watch the true moment Bruce Lee found his groove.
Don’t get me wrong, his previous effort, The Big Boss – aka. Fists Of Fury (rolls eyes) – is great fun, but it’s rather uncertain tone and the fact it held Lee’s gift for ass-kickery back for a third of the run time means that you didn’t quite get the full force of artist’s lightning skills. However, thanks to a more traditional story line (vengeance for a dead master is probably a more regularly used plotline than killer stalks teens or cop avenging a slain partner combined) and an air of seriousness, Fist Of Fury has super-serious focus that nicely complments Lee’s famously intense demeanour as he tears through his enemies like a deranged madman.
Lee is, unsurprisingly, magnificent, cementing those overdue leading man credentials with style, charisma and ton of those super-weird facial expressions that guy kept pulling that only enhances the hyper-realism of the piece. Chen isn’t just super pissed at his racist enemies, no, his trembling body language and contorted facial features clearly show that he’s super-duper mega pissed and it makes the exaggerated violence he doles out seem weirdly realostic, even if he’s wiping out a dojo full of thugs single handedly. However, while his ability to deliver legitimately realistic looking pain to to hapless stuntmen, Lee also does well when having to play the quieter, more sensitive stuff like trying to justify his behavior to Nora Miao’s understanding love interest or ultimately having to face the bloody consequences of his actions.
Of course, the real reason we’re naturally all here is to watch our iconic lead brutally rearrange the bone structure of anyone who dares rub him up the wrong way and it’s probably pound for pound the best showcase for Lee’s infamous skills at it truly reveals why big Bruce was the best to ever throw a kick. Not only do we have him wiping out a room full of guys with maximum efficiency and an obligatory Nunchaku sequence where he cracks more shins than an item of unfamiliar furniture in a home for the blind, but the brawl he has with a luxuriously moustached, Russian hench-thug (actually Bruce’s real-life student, Robert Baker) maybe one of the greatest one on ones seen in martial arts cinema and measures up nicely to the similarly savage battles Jackie Chan went on to share with Benny Urquidez. Elsewhere, Lee’s anti-hero busts out finishing moves that would make the Mortal Kombat gang gasp as he stylishly manuevers attackers to impaled themselves on their own samurai swords or simply just stand there, continuously screeching and quivering a good fifteen seconds after the guy he blasted with a death blow has already crumpled to the floor and expired, but Fist Of Fury admirably tempers its exhilarating uber-violence with an equally harsh dose of consequence which leads our rage-soaked hero to ultimately accept the reality of his behaviour and engage in a Kung-Fu themed variation of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.
Common consensus agrees that Enter The Dragon is Bruce Lee’s most accomplished movie and while I’ll happy concede to that school of thought, it simply wouldn’t have existed without Lee taking control of the fight choreography and delivering a brand of stinging brutality that truly showed the world the furious nature of those fabled fists.
Although, those legs of legend are pretty devastating too…
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