I’ve taken falls on concrete for a living and spent more hours in a dojo than I care to invoice anyone for, so believe me when I say I don’t hand out reverence easily. But every few years I rewatch Enter the Dragon and come away humbled all over again. I grew up on a VHS copy taped off cable, tracking lines and all, and even through that fuzz Bruce Lee’s screen presence hit like a liver shot. Watching it now on a proper restoration, the thing that strikes me isn’t nostalgia. It’s how much of the modern action playbook this movie wrote in 1973, and how few films since have actually improved on it.
Let’s talk about the action first, because that’s where my professional jealousy lives. Lee choreographed his own fights, and the philosophy is visible in every frame: wide shots, long takes, full bodies in view. There’s no shaky cam hiding a stuntman’s face, no cutting on every strike to manufacture impact. When Lee throws that side kick that sends O’Hara flying into the seated crowd, you see the whole technique, hip rotation to recoil. The famous production story is that Lee was genuinely too fast for the camera, and crews had to adjust how they shot him so his strikes would even register at 24 frames per second. Having worked with performers who need editing to look fast, I can tell you that problem almost never happens in the other direction.
The stunt work deserves its own paragraph because the supporting roster here is absurd in hindsight. The Hong Kong stunt community that fills out the underground lair brawl includes a young Jackie Chan, who gets his hair yanked and his neck cranked by Lee in a blink-and-miss-it moment, plus Sammo Hung, who opens the entire film grappling with Lee in that shoot-style exhibition match. That opening fight is quietly radical, by the way. It’s basically MMA decades early: takedowns, an armbar finish, fingerless grappling gloves. The cavern sequence is controlled chaos with dozens of bodies, real contact, and reaction timing that modern second units still study. These guys were getting paid almost nothing and selling hits with their spines.
Now the history, because this movie is a document as much as a film. Enter the Dragon was the first major martial arts picture co-produced by a Hollywood studio, with Warner Bros. partnering with Golden Harvest and Lee’s own Concord Production company. That deal only happened because Lee had been burned by Hollywood, most famously when the Kung Fu television concept went forward with David Carradine instead of him, and he went back to Hong Kong and became the biggest star in Asia on his own terms. America didn’t discover Bruce Lee. America passed on Bruce Lee, and he forced the door open from the outside. That context makes his swagger in this film feel earned rather than performed.
The film’s cultural footprint is hard to overstate. Jim Kelly’s presence as Williams bridges the kung fu film and blaxploitation cinema, two genres that would feed each other for the rest of the decade, and his scenes confronting racist cops landed with real weight for 1973 audiences. The plot itself is a cheerful lift of the James Bond formula, complete with island fortress and cat-stroking villain energy from Shih Kien’s Han, who was around sixty during filming and still moves better than most of us ever will. And the timing is the tragedy baked into the legend: Lee died six days before the Hong Kong premiere, at thirty-two, just as the film was about to make him a global superstar. Every dojo that opened in a strip mall in the late seventies traces back to this release.
Is it perfect? No. The pacing sags in the middle, some of the dubbing is rough, and John Saxon’s Roper exists mostly because the studio wanted a white co-lead they could put on the poster. But the mirror room finale remains one of the great visual set pieces in the genre, an idea so good that everything from John Wick to countless video games has borrowed it. As a fight scene it’s sparse; as filmmaking it’s iconic. Enter the Dragon isn’t just a good martial arts movie. It’s the proof of concept for an entire industry, made by a man who knew exactly how good he was and finally had the budget to show everyone else. Five stars, no notes that matter.
