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YMMV / Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story

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  • Accidental Aesop: If you are fighting in a hostile environment, never ever turn your back to your opponent even after the match is over.
  • Awesome Music: The film's theme "The Dragon's Heartbeat", which has been used by countless trailers since.
  • Broken Base: Bruce Lee fans are split about this film, some disliking it due to the artistic liberties taken about Bruce's life, others finding it a touching tribute to him.
  • Fight Scene Failure: The rematch's choreography is generally good, but when Lee launches the flying side kick that throws Sun off the ring, it's painfully visible that Jason Scott Lee's foot passes miles away from John Cheung's head.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The film depicts Bruce battling his family demon to protect his son Brandon. Brandon Lee would die from an accidental gun discharge during the making of The Crow a few months prior to this film's release. Making this worse is the fact that Brandon turned down the opportunity to play his father, opting to do The Crow instead.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Back in the day, Dragon was the story of a young Bruce Lee who got into so many fights that he had to go abroad to America where he encountered racism, pursued an education, and had many more battles, both physical and spiritual to fight, as he was haunted by a personal Demon. Over a quarter of a century later, the movie Ip Man 4 is released with a similar but decomposited premise. Ip Man's son, Ip Ching, is the troubled young man who keeps getting into fights. Ip Man then decides to go to America to try to find a school there for his son to study in, encounters hostile anti-Chinese attitudes in people like Geddes and Becky while having to physically fight some of them, has a fight against a Wong Jack Man stand-in (Wan) who disagrees with Bruce teaching people of other races like Bruce in this movie fought Johnny Sun, and undergoes his own personal demons in the form of cancer. And to top it all off, there's another version of Bruce Lee in the film but the character arc of Dragon Bruce is split between both Ip Man and his son.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Your Mileage May Vary on the demon, but the part where he shows Bruce his own grave is scary in its own right. Genius Bonus when you notice it doesn't just show the date that Bruce died in real life, but that is an accurate replica of his grave, only with Jason Scott Lee replacing the real Bruce in the photo.
  • No Problem with Licensed Games: The fighting game adaptation, while it didn't set the world alight, is a fairly competent game that stays true to the movie, even adding fights against the demon as a gameplay mechanic in lieu of continues.
  • Signature Scene: The scene depicting Kato as a relentless one-man wrecking crew while the Green Hornet sits helplessly tied to a chair and blurting "Good job, Kato!" in a pathetic attempt to make himself seem relevant. While not accurate to the actual show at all, it became pervasive enough that most people remember the show as being that way, apparently including the people who made the 2011 movie.

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