I saw "Birth of the Dragon", starring-mostly Chinese actors, with one Caucasian thrown into the mix-Philip Ng-The Man From Macau, New Police Story; Yu Xia-Bull Brothers, Dragon Squad and Billy Magnussen-Bridge of Spies, Into the Woods.

I must admit, I am a big Bruce Lee fan. This is based loosely on an article written by Michael Dorgan called 'Bruce Lee's Toughest Fight'. When Bruce Lee first came to San Francisco in the early 1960's-and before he became famous-there was a fight between him and a Shaolin Kung Fu monk that supposedly changed people's lives, both his and the monk's. Bruce had opened a martial arts school and taught anyone that wanted to learn. Most of the Chinese martial artist did not like Bruce teaching non-Asians and let him know it-usually by getting into fights. Wong Jack Man was a Shaolin master that came to San Francisco for reasons of his own, but ended up getting into the legendary fight with the up and coming Bruce Lee in an abandoned warehouse that only about a dozen people witnessed. Philip plays Bruce and Yu plays Wong. Billy plays one of Bruce's students-the lone Caucasian in the film- that is based loosely on one of Bruce's real life students, Steve McQueen. Here, he is called Steve McKee and in my opinion, he could have been left out of the movie-he had a side story that was not that interesting. The actual fight is pretty good with both men getting some lumps as well as giving some-it wasn't lopsided in either man's favor. After this fight, Bruce developed his own fighting style, Jeet Kune Do, which in itself is the forefather of mixed martial arts. It's rated "PG-13" for martial arts violence and language and has a running time of 1 hour & 43 minutes. I enjoyed the fight scenes and I would buy this one on DVD.

Back in the day I thought the Hollywood Bruce Lee biopic, DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY was nothing special, but it makes this amateur-hour production look like a masterpiece. BIRTH OF THE DRAGON is a cheap, digital, befuddled affair in which Bruce Lee turns out to be a supporting character in his own movie while other, uninteresting figures steal the limelight. And as for the 'Steve McKee' character...what were they thinking? The Lee accent is correct here, but everything else is wrong, and even worse the cheap plotting allows for silly melodrama and little else. Things only pick up for an action-packed climax, and if there had been more of that earlier on this might have been halfway decent.

This is a fictionalized historical drama centering around the legendary 1964 fight between Bruce Lee and Shaolin Master Wong Jack Man.

Looking for facts in this movie is fool's gold. That is not the best way to judge this movie. This is not really pretending to be a documentary. Any pretense is thrown out the window when they start floating down to the ground. This movie is almost trying to teach lessons. In that sense, it's done in a ham-fisted way. The dialogue lacks subtlety. Most of the problem lies with Billy Magnussen as Steve McKee. He's playing the clueless white guy. One thing that Magnussen is good at is his unfocused anger acting. So he's good at that part of the character but too much of it is really annoying. It's lazy writing. I am willing to take this version of Bruce Lee since it's a part of a character arc. Basically, this is written by a film student after finishing script-writing 101. It has the playbook but it doesn't implement it well.