Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Berry Gordy’s 1985 film The Last Dragon, a recent addition to the Netflix catalog, is a tantalizing glimpse at how things were supposed to go. It’s the truth. It’s spiritually co-mingled with Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire (released the year before): the two films form a pair of stylized, genre-bending fables of the reconstruction in a culturally-divided United States. Directed by Michael Schultz (Cooley High, Car Wash), The Last Dragon has a lot to say about how blaxploitation found inspiration and expression through the Bruce Lee/Shaw Brothers era of kung fu spectacular. It sees Chinese culture as virile and aspirational, counterprogramming for mainstream America’s comfort with the sexless Mr. Miyagi Yoda fantasy or Long Duck Dong’s neutered comic relief archetype. When an objectively terrible movie like Crazy Rich Asians finds a huge audience, it speaks to how hungry Asian-Americans are for a different kind of representation in Hollywood even now, thirty years down the road.
The charm of The Last Dragon, and key to its lasting potency as a cult object, is how it approaches a conversation about race with humor, even kindness. Its self-deprecation forgives a multitude of sins. Hero Bruce Leroy (Taimak) is an airy, dreamy African-American kid who idolizes Bruce Lee by studying martial arts; taking on a soft, vaguely-accented voice; turning his back on the family pizzeria business. As the film opens, his crusty Master (Thomas Ikeda) says that he can’t teach him anymore. You “knew without knowing,” he says, and “it is a fortune cookie without a fortune.” It’s the kind of mumbo-jumbo Joel Grey, in an infamous yellowface performance in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (released just seven months after The Last Dragon) parlayed into an Oscar nomination. Crucially, this Master reveals himself in truth to be more interested in going to Miami to visit his mother than helping Bruce continue to wax on and on and on. “I am confused,” Bruce says. “Good,” the Master says. Confusion, after all, is a part of life.
Bruce wanders through New York in traditional Chinese garb to the tunes of Motown legend Willie Hutch’s “Inside You”. It’s a sequence that calls back to Chauncey Gardner’s first walk outside the compound in Being There, likewise establishing this character as anachronistic outsider and naif. Indeed, when erstwhile love interest and music VJ Laura Charles (Vanity) makes some overt moves on him, all Bruce can do is loosen the collar of his zhongsan and ask if it’s getting hot in her convertible. Bruce goes to the movies to watch his idol’s Enter the Dragon when one of the villains of the piece, gang leader Sho’nuff (Julius Carry), interrupts the show to challenge Bruce to a showdown. Sho’nuff is the film’s manifestation of appropriation, while the other villain, music producer Eddie Arkadian (Christopher Murney), is its manifestation of venality. Bruce’s ideological purity is the way and the light. His journey of self discovery is a rebuke to Sho’nuff’s desire for reputation, Eddie’s acquisition of wealth. One’s in it for the performative wokeness, the other for the green. It’s timeless. The tension of the film, then, is not whether Bruce will prevail over the bad guys and win the lady fair, but whether Bruce will be able to do so while remaining true to his foundational ideas of fairness, humility and decency.
The path The Last Dragon takes to its literally-uplifting conclusion is as pure as Bruce’s. There are musical numbers, including a good portion of Debarge’s “Rhythm of the Night” video that vaulted it to Billboard immortality, as well as multiple fight sequences real martial artist Taimak carries off with aplomb. The real magic, however, is in The Last Dragon‘s social conscience. Consider a beautiful subplot involving a trio of jive-talking Chinese guys, Hu Yi (Henry Yuk), Lu Yi (Michael G. Chin) and Du Yi (Frederic Mao) —aka Huey, Louis and Dewey— shooting dice somewhere called “Sum Dum Guy.” Bruce, looking for a new guru to follow, speaks to them like an Asian stereotype while getting mocked by Chinese guys speaking as urban stereotypes. A minefield traversed with good nature. It’s always meant something to this Asian-American that when Bruce achieves full actualization, what the film calls “The Glow,” that said glow is yellow.
Listen to a speech given to Eddie by his protege, Cyndi Lauper-manque Angela (Faith Prince), when she realizes she’s been used by him. “And in the end, Eddie, you know what? You’re nothing but a misguided midget asshole with dreams of ruling the world… and also getting by on my tits.” It’s so contemporary and powerful a statement that Tessa Thompson’s character in Sorry to Bother You uses it, word for word, as the centerpiece of her performance art project. Entertaining if it were only a technicolor relic of the ’80s, unpack The Last Dragon as a roadmap for how to have a fulsome, useful conversation about race and gender. We need it now more than ever.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due Spring of 2019. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.
