Kind of impossible to rate accurately since there are so many things going on at once.

The first level (the easiest one, naturally) is pure entertainment, in which this is probably a 3.5 or so, thanks to Robert Clouse's brisk direction, Dean Jagger's deceptively cheerful heavy, and a few pretty good action scenes - not to mention the transcendent pagoda sequence, orchestrated by and starring the real Bruce Lee himself, maybe the best fight(s) he ever did.

Second level is the historical trainwreck of trying to make a piecemeal movie out of all kinds of leftover Bruce Lee footage, using tricks both clever and forehead-slappingly dumb. My favorite is a subplot that has Bruce's character getting shot in the face…

This Game of Death is a film built around 12 minutes of original footage that Bruce Lee had done for his own movie with the same title. The scenes they filmed to complete the movie were done 5 years after Lee's death and they also used some footage from some of his older films as well. They even use footage from his actual funeral... I kid you not.

If you actually consider this a Bruce Lee Film then it's his worst one by far, but if you consider this a Bruceploitation Film (which you should) then it's the most famous one. It's almost worth watching just for the 12 minutes of real Bruce Lee footage that was shot for the…

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if Bruce Lee had lived to finish Game of Death, and so gone on to lead a full, productive, evolving existence? Perhaps still alive even now. Ninety years old. A faded and philosophically serene life lesson of a man. A master in repose.

Also, it’s pretty badass that it's an American giant, even a seemingly cursed and perhaps mystically touched one, who has attained the highest position in the South Korean Pagoda, The Temple of the Unknown.

The fact that Bruce Lee’s vision for Game of Death never came to be is a true loss to cinema, but I wouldn’t have minded having a separate movie all about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s character either. Where did that…

Just the most remarkable collection of 1970s bodies to display: not just Bruce Lee, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who was also replaced by a double for a couple of early scenes), Sammo Hung, and Colleen Camp as well, each iconic in their own ways.

An accidental kind of a masterpiece. A film about the fungibility of non-white bodies, about how the colonialist/capitalist class sees bodies as commodities, to be exploited and tossed aside whenever convenient that itself ghoulishly repurposes a real Asian body to make a quick Hollywood buck. An assertion of control over a body iconic for its rebelliousness, the film is a perfect encapsulation of the process by which capital captures a popular revolution (or in this case, revolutionary…

Sick-day movie. Watched on VHS.

On this viewing I really got a kick out of the incongruous western elements. The John Barry score. The James Bondian opening credits. The slumming C-list character actors. Poor Colleen Camp acting into a void. Imagine trying to generate chemistry with “Billy Lo.”

After the credits, this begins as badly as it’s possible for a movie to begin. The obvious doubling. The mismatched stock footage. Bruce Lee’s photo literally pasted on a mirror. The rest of the movie could have been Citizen Kane and it would have struggled to recover. And to be clear: the rest of this movie is not Citizen Kane.

If Bruce Lee had lived, I think it’s entirely possible, and even…

Weekend At BruceLee's
or
That Deceased Object of Desire

Testament to Bruce Lee's star power that you could rummage around in his trash, find five minutes of him performing, pad it with a low rent thriller, and still produce a movie that people will watch until the end of time just for those now iconic five minutes. Well, the rest ain't all bad, I guess: the "let's hide the fact that this isn't really Bruce Lee" games range from intriguing to surreal to downright hilarious, Dean Jagger's Dr. Land is as intimidating of a mob boss as senile Junior Soprano (the fish feeding scene! the Lion Dance traffic jam!), and Colleen Camp lives up to her surname giving no fewer…

Might as well go straight to the elephant in the room - this is the movie where Bruce Lee isn't Bruce Lee. Lee tragically died at the age of 32 when Game of Death was still being shot. The film was released posthumously by Golden Harvest 5 years later, and basically constructed a whole story around 11 minutes of actual Bruce Lee footage. The result is undeniably a hack job where the stitching is painfully obvious. Lee's stand-in, despite director Robert Clouse's attempts to shoot him from behind wherever possible or in shadow, is never very convincing. It's actually pretty distracting. With the best will in the world, it's never amounts to more than a guy pretending to be Bruce…

“When you get to the top you understand how far it is to fall.”

One of the most popular movies and also an incomplete one of Bruce Lee, where we can see the iconic scene with him on yellow clothes fighting with nunchucks (and also one of his last performances on the big screen).

During filming, Lee received an offer to do Enter the Dragon, which was going to be the first kung fu movie to be produced by a Hollywood studio. Before Game of Death was released, Lee died of cerebral edema, so the new director had to use two stand-ins to finish it, since he stopped the recording of this one, in order to start with Enter the…