"Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" concludes that Lee's terminal coma was caused by unexplained natural causes, but the movie offers a more fanciful possibility: He was finally hunted down by the fearsome warrior who haunted his nightmares.
Lee did believe in the dreams, and even dressed his baby son, Brandon, as a girl, to outwit the demons. All silliness, of course, except that now Brandon Lee is dead, too, long before his time. The timing of the release of this film, so soon after Brandon's shooting death on a movie set, is both ironic and eerie. The movie goes to some lengths to emphasize the positive side of Bruce Lee's life, but now the ghost of his son haunts his memory.
"Dragon" is based on Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, the autobiography of Linda Lee Cadwell, Lee's wife, played here by Lauren Holly. It traces his immigration to America, his early days as a karate instructor, his breakthrough in a short-lived TV series, and his eventual emergence as a movie star just as his life was nearing its end. Some old scores are settled: The hit series "Kung Fu" was Lee's original idea, we learn, but David Carradine starred in it because of the network's reluctance to cast an Asian. But mostly "Dragon" is a rags-to-riches story.
Lee is played in the film by Jason Scott Lee (no relation), a gifted young actor who also stars in the current "Map Of The Human Heart." He brings some of the same exuberance to the role that audiences enjoyed in Bruce Lee's films. Flying through the air, defying gravity and logic in his martial arts moves, both Lees use film to give them power over time and space. You cannot do in real life most of the things the characters in these movies do, because of the unfortunate restrictions imposed by Newton's Laws, but what the heck: It's fun to watch.
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