Dynamo

Despite an obvious setback, Bruce Lee's death didn't stop Hong Kong's more devious movie producers from attempting to make new Bruce Lee films. Dozens of counterfeit projects sprang up in the wake of the star's passing, many positioning themselves as sequels or continuations of the actor's brief but transformative career. Dynamo takes a novel approach to this bootlegging. Shan Hua's film forgoes picking at the departed actor's scraps to focus instead on the real life rush to find a credible replacement. Dynamo then is a Bruceploitation film specifically about the unsentimental business practices that drove that particular sub-genre - it acknowledges the cynicism, channelling it into an overarching state of anxiety.

Bruce Li plays Lee Ting Yi, a taxi driver who impresses Mary Hon's charming but unscrupulous talent agent with his martial arts skills and muscular good looks. Lee's hackman is exactly what she's looking for - a fresh face for the fame machine. Despite Dynamo's hard-nosed framing, the film keeps Li and Hon's characters apart, essentially in separate pieces. One concerning a likeable backstabber, making a name for herself in the PR trade; the other a mixed-up martial arts film in which a cabby trains with his very own drunken master (an entertaining Ku Feng) before being relentlessly attacked by mobsters in picturesque environments. That Dynamo survives only as a choppy English dub (that may or may not be missing scenes) only exacerbates this sense of disconnection. Li's energetic fight scenes - choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping - are exciting but the threats he faces are dramatically ill-defined and, despite a last-minute kidnapped girlfriend, even strangely impersonal.