Finishing the Game is a Modest But Amusing Riff on the Legend of Bruce Lee
Nothing says “quality” quite like “Blockbuster Exclusive”
When it came to Bruce Lee and movies, death was only the beginning. The martial arts icon died at the peak of his powers, when demand for his services was at an all-time high. He wasn’t just the breakout star of 1973’s obscenely lucrative, wildly influential Enter the Dragon, he was a cinematic God worshipped by a devout and ever-growing cult.
The public couldn’t get enough of Bruce Lee at the time of his death. Because there was a great deal of money to be made in the Bruce Lee business, filmmakers all over the world decided that while the former Green Hornet sidekick’s untimely and mysterious death may have been an impediment to giving the world more Bruce Lee, it did not represent an insurmountable one.
In the aftermath of the zeitgeist-capturing success of Lee’s magnum opus Enter the Dragon and his death in 1973 the market was flooded by imitation fare starring lookalikes with soundalike names like Bruce Li, Bruce Lai and Bruce Le. Lee’s enduring popularity didn’t just inspire a shameless knock-off or two but rather than an entire genre of “Bruceploitation” devoted to satiating the public’s need for Bruce Lee-style content in the regrettable absence of the man himself.
Lee has been the subject of biopics like 1993’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and popped up as a supporting character in a slew of movies, perhaps most notably in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, where, in a somewhat off-brand development, he is soundly walloped by Brad Pitt’s laconic stuntman. Bruce Lee’s ghost is a similarly ubiquitous cinematic fixture: in 1986’s No Retreat, No Surrender, which introduced international audiences to a model-handsome Belgian martial artist named Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Bruce Lee-obsessed hero is trained by Bruce Lee’s ghost.
Nearly a half century after dying young and beautiful and full of unrealized potential, Bruce Lee he continues to cast a long shadow over martial arts and action movies. Bruce Lee never appears in the 2007 mockumentary Finishing the Game but it’s hard to overstate his importance to the film and its plot. In many ways it is a Bruce Lee without Bruce Lee the same way Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’s Band was a Beatles movie without the Beatles.
When Justin Lin co-wrote (with Josh Diamond) and directed Finishing the Game, he had already made his breakthrough film in 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow, which was hailed for exploring a side of Asian-American life seldom seen on the big screen. He was already on his way to becoming an A-list, multi-billion-dollar action filmmaker with his first entry in the Fast and the Furious franchise, 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
Lin would go on to become the go-to director for the mega-bucks franchise, directing 2009’s Fast & Furious, 2011’s Fast Five, 2013’s Fast & Furious 6 and F9. In between these big-budget monstrosities Lin found time to make, in Finishing the Game, a modestly budgeted, unmistakably personal mockumentary in the Christopher Guest mold very loosely based on real events.
When Bruce Lee died on July 20th, 1973 he was still in the middle of shooting his feverishly anticipated follow-up to Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, which would not be finished until 1978, with very little original footage of Lee remaining in the final product.
Filming for Game of Death was nowhere near finished at the time of Lee’s death but demand for an actual movie starring the real Bruce Lee, rather than Bruce Le or Bruce Li, was so high that rather than take Lee’s death as a clear-cut sign from the universe to pull the plug on the seemingly doomed production, opportunistic filmmakers plowed ahead with the bright idea of using lookalike body doubles to finish in Lee’s place.
Finishing the Game imagines what the competition for the role of replacing the most irreplaceable man in martial arts in the aftermath of his death might have looked and felt like as an array of wacky characters fight for a role that, if done well, will render them all but invisible, since audiences would attribute their derring-do to the ostensible star of the movie, the simultaneously immortal and all too mortal Bruce Lee.
In that respect, the role of “finishing” Lee’s part in Game of Death seems glamorous and juicy from a distance — who wouldn’t want to be part of Bruce Lee’s cinematic world at a time when he was arguably the hottest star in the world? — but is actually perversely thankless, little more than a body double with way too much screen time.
That does not keep the wannabes and schemers here from desperately seeking a gig that could be their big break, or could lead to nothing. The contenders include the pragmatically titled Breeze Loo (Roger Fan), the star of Z-grade kung fu flicks like Fists of Fuhrer. He’s a crazed narcissist who takes pride in doing none of his own fighting yet sees Lee as a colleague and contemporary he is honoring by sharing a role and not a superstar whose essence he shamelessly stole.
Dustin Nguyen costars as Troy Poon, a struggling actor who graduated from roles as Chinese food delivery men to costar in a gritty hit cop drama that is taken off the air forever when costar Dean Silo (James Franco, in a very funny cameo) dies an untimely death that involves every drug, auto-erotic asphyxiation, racist garb and pretty much everything else anyone could ever find embarrassing or humiliating.
Sung Kang, who played fan favorite Han in Lin’s Fast and the Furious sequels, and in Better Luck Tomorrow, plays Cole Kim, the mockumentary’s everyman audience surrogate, an actor bumping up hard against show-business’ very limited conception of what Asian-American actors can do onscreen.
Lin really leans into the 1970s atmosphere. He doesn’t just lovingly recreate it in cinematic costume party form, he fetishizes its wild hairstyles, funky, flamboyant fashions and all-around outrageousness.
The funky wah-wah guitars in Brian Tyler’s score give the proceedings an unmistakable blaxploitation texture while the costumes and hair seem as inspired by the Beastie Boys’ music video for “Sabotage” as they are by the actual cinematic era the film is chronicling. The cop show that catapults Trey Poon to unfortunately brief stardom similarly feels drawn from the same study, Beastie Boys-heavy blueprint and the well-worn conventions of kung fu movies give the filmmakers an awful lot to work with.
MC Hammer has a fun cameo as an agent with a big Colgate smile who specializes in getting insultingly stereotypical roles for his clients because if you were non-white in the early 1970s those were pretty much the only roles available. That’s also, unfortunately, largely true of the decades that followed as well.
As with Hollywood Shuffle a little over two decades earlier, there is an unmistakable pain underneath the gleeful genre mockery and satirical riffs rooted in the price society pays for being unable to recognize and appreciate the humanity and complexities of minorities.
If there is a villain here it’s show-business racism that mirrors the soft and hard bigotry of the times and forced Asian-American actors hoping to work in film and television into a depressingly limited series of roles, many involving martial arts, that denied them agency and autonomy.
Finishing the Game is about as short as a movie can be while still qualifying as feature-length. The action concludes well before the eighty-minute mark but the movie does not build to a climax so much as it sort of just ends in a way that lowers its stakes from exceedingly low to non-existent. Finishing the Game feels like it is missing a reel or two.
Lin’s spunky mockumentary fatally lacks a third act but its first act is funny, fresh and genuinely satirical enough to make its weaknesses forgivable. Finishing the Game may be a trifle but it has something of substance to say about the Asian-American experience in film in Bruce Lee’s time and today and a frequently breezy, delightful way of saying it.
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