Game of Death

A piecemeal picture that subsumes, rather than embellishes, the electrifying remains of a thwarted Bruce Lee film. Game of Death, as released, abandons the actor-screenwriter-director's original concept of a man fighting his way up a pagoda filled with martial arts masters on the grounds that, in the years since Lee's death, the idea had been well worked over by copycat productions. Stuck with less than a hour of fight focused footage and the promise of guaranteed Japanese box office, Golden Harvest recruited Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse and fight coordinator (listed as co-director on the film's Hong Kong print) Sammo Hung to finish what Lee started.

Clouse and producer Raymond Chow, working together under the screenwriting pseudonym Jan Spears, dashed off a script that looked to the conspiracy theories surrounding Lee's death for inspiration. As completed, the film blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, following an actor named Billy Lo who fakes his death in order to investigate the criminal syndicate that has hounded him into this early grave. Lo's screen presence is an amalgam then, built out of genuine Lee close-ups snipped out of other films, the sequences Lee himself shot for his incomplete project, a couple of rickety optical effects, and the combined efforts of stunt performer Yuen Biao and feature double Kim Tai-chung.

This fractured performance informs Game of Death's structure. Clouse and Hung's film is, essentially, one without a star actor. The scenes and situations attributed to the lead character are evasive out of necessity. We cannot sit and spend time with Lo, we cannot sink into his dilemma, because the film has to keep him at arm's length. Game of Death proposes a fiction, that Lee is still alive to entertain us, then spends its running time concealing or obliterating that which audiences found exciting about the star. Kim, the actor who spends the most time in the Lo role, is never allowed to assume Lee's mantle. Even after Lo face's is surgically rebuilt after being shattered by a bullet, Kim's likeness stays obscured, usually by rapid editing but also by gimmicks such as bandages or oversized sunglasses.

Although a talented kicker, the dangers Kim battles through feel uncoupled from the terrifying, identity shattering situation Lo finds himself in. They are often scuffles, exchanges in which Lo is outnumbered then roughed up. The decisive, overwhelming force that made Lee's name is diffused, never more obnoxiously than when Biao is instructed to tumble incessantly for Hugh O'Brian's lumbering, clumsy enforcer. This disconnect is so pronounced that when Colleen Camp's bereaved girlfriend packs a pistol into her purse and sets out for revenge the film briefly springs to life, buzzing along a credible emotional wavelength. As it is Game of Death all too often seems to be falling in line with its mob of moneyed up white men; spending scene after scene in the company of the syndicate parasites who latch onto Chinese talent then exploit them for their own greedy ends.

Even setting aside Bruce Lee's contribution, it's not too difficult to sniff out which elements of the film can be apportioned to each of the competing directors. As well as working on-set, choreographing the fights needed to drive the new film, Hung was brought back later to pump up the flaccid action that Clouse had delivered. This want as far as shooting a brand new sequence only included in the Hong Kong release (this punchy greenhouse dispute between Kim and Casanova Wong would end up spliced into the English international version of Game of Death II). Sammo also works in front of the camera, battling Robert Wall in a martial arts main event. This clash is easily the best of those shot exclusively for the 1978 film, mixing Hung's trademark hard contact style with a pacing patterned after sports contests.

Clouse's flat intrigue does eventually end up working for the film though. Once Lo learns the location of the syndicate, we're back into middle distance action, watching stunt performers methodically, and silently, break into a shadowy building. It's here that Game of Death is finally able to transition to its mother lode moments - the film that Lee was never able to finish. Once Lo is inside there's a nod to establishing continuity, to knit the empty interior of the Red Pepper restaurant to the stacked, spacious arenas in Lee's tower of death. We see an anonymous body heading up a set of wooden stairs, facing away from the camera. This subdued, mechanical building block proposes nothing but momentum - a man climbs a staircase - but it carries us into the next sequence, giving Bruce Lee the propulsive, energetic entrance he deserves.

Of course Lee relaxes instantly after launching himself up the last few steps, as if anticipating a rapturous round of applause. He deserves one. We've broken through to a completely different realm of filmmaking now, one that does, definitively, have a star. Lee commands attention, reacting to Dan Inosanto's perched weapons expert with a louche, unhurried confidence. When Inosanto begins striking his sinawali sticks together, attempting to intimidate this trespasser, Lee responds by tapping out a beat of his own, using a length of lacquered bamboo that he wields like a rapier. Lee, the director, is assured in his use of space, using inaction and sound to prime his audience for a meatier form of confrontation.

This transformation is striking - Clouse's film described an assailed man who could barely keep his head above water. Lee's film is about mastery, testing observable, incredible, skill against a succession of singular threats. As well as Inosanto, Lee faces Ji Han-jae, a hapkido master and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's gigantic, supernatural fighter. Originally Lee, accompanied by James Tien and Chieh Yuan, would spend at least 40 minutes battling through these opponents. These sequences were not simply action as punctuation then, Lee's Game of Death used the battles as a way to tell a philosophical story about physical and mental flexibility. In Clouse's film these ideas are hacked down to a little over 11 minutes. Tien and Chieh's presence are completely deleted, at times the film optically cropped to ensure the audience doesn't pick up on their phantom performances.

This pruning denies Lee his authorial voice, expunging his metaphysical framing, as well as the knockabout camaraderie that existed between the allied fighters. The tone stays heavy too, the lighter, more comedic touch that Lee the director displayed in The Way of the Dragon all but eliminated. Although Lee's Game of Death was shot without sound, Clouse also remains reluctant to manufacture a vocal performance for his former star beyond a chorus of overlapping kiai calls. It's a strange hesitance in a film so callous that it includes actual images of Bruce Lee's funeral procession. Accompanying this aural assault is John Barry's brooding Bond style score. Barry's music slathered all over these inherited minutes; a pounding loop that reaches too far into heroic to match the gasping choke holds actually up on the big screen.

Despite this tinkering, Lee's ferocity and fluidity remain immutable. The fleeting Lo (not) seen in the rest of the 1978 film is replaced with a big, bold principle actor, one dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, swinging nunchaku straight into the camera. It's not simply gravity that Lee finally provides, the three fights his Lo muscles through each have a separate lesson and psychological trajectory. The Inosanto fight demonstrates the inflexibility of pageantry. When the two fighters find themselves at an expertise impasse, it's Lee's character who gains the upper hand by adapting - in this case kicking his way through his opponent's chain stick demonstration. The Lee and Ji Han-jae set-to that follows hinges on a willingness to injure - ruinously - rather than simply stick to an arcane, uncommunicated scoring system.

Lo stumbles away from the hapkido fight, injured and exhausted. He limps up yet another staircase, entering into the realm of Abdul-Jabbar's Hakim. This encounter explores the tension between exhaustion and frustration. Lo instantly mounts an attack only to be immediately driven away by Hakim's enormous foot. The problems facing Lo are reach and power - Hakim outmatches him in both departments. Over the course of the fight Lo moderates his assault, tuning into an unsportsmanlike form of attack that prioritises strikes that stand outside of the strict formalities of martial arts. Lo stamps on Hakim's foot; directs blow after blow towards his genitals. Eventually Lo settles on his weight as a deciding factor, hooking his arms around Hakim's neck and dragging the pair to the floor. Lo tightens and tightens his grip until Hakim's neck cracks then crumbles.

It's an ugly finish but it speaks to the sense of human emotion, in this case anxiety, that Lee was keen to weave into his films. The actor-screenwriter-director proposes an exhausted, hardscrabble dimension, reflected in his desperate, anything-goes tactics. A framing atypical for a genre that often operates with dream logic. Unfortunately, Clouse doesn't have the good sense to end the film here. Lo must surmount two further challenges, both of which seem designed to neuter any of the rolling excitement generated by the last three Lee battles - the tussle between Kim and Biao's Lo and O'Brian's Steiner might as well be taking place underwater, such is its lack of intensity. The death of Dean Jagger's syndicate boss, Dr Land, is equally airless and haphazard too. Lo essentially chasing the decrepit mobster until he falls off a roof. An anticlimactic end to a piece apparently designed to propose the boon of a brand new Bruce Lee film then deliver on that promise with so little consistent spectacle that audiences are left feeling that they've had their fill.