Motown's Campy 1985 Martial Arts/Music Mash-Up The Last Dragon Remains a Winner. It's Got the Glow!
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The 1985 R&B martial arts comedy/Bruce Lee homage The Last Dragon falls into the fairly sizable category of movies I distinctly if vaguely remembered really digging as a kid and have alway wanted to re-watch.
That’s where you beautiful people come in. It was chosen as part of the Kickstarter for my extremely purchasable new book The Joy of Trash. That meant that it was no longer a mere possibility but rather an inevitability and a responsibility.
As professional responsibilities go, having to re-watch a fun movie from your childhood that you have enormous nostalgia for is tough to beat.
I don’t entirely remember where, but I remember watching The Last Dragon in the theater during its release in 1985 when I was nine years old. It’s possible that I saw it at a drive-in, the ideal location, but I also could have watched it in the mall where my dad worked as a real estate agent.
Regardless, I have very fond memories of it, in part because my dad taught me at a young age that Berry Gordy was a great man and created a musical empire almost unparalleled in our time.
In other words, he raised me right. I don’t want to brag but I’m probably only the white person alive familiar with core Motown artists like Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and the Supremes.
Growing up we would listen to an album of 25 number one Motown hits that obviously not a lot of people know about but are actually pretty catchy. So the idea of a Berry Gordon movie would have impressed my dad.
I didn’t remember much of the specifics of The Last Dragon but I remembered it having a winning formula of black music and black culture plus martial arts executed with tongue thoroughly in cheek and a whole lot of music, as befits a Motown production.
Oh boy is The Last Dragon a Motown production! Over and over again it stops completely so that it can shill for the soundtrack album, most egregiously in a dance club scene that essentially recycles the entire music video for El DeBarge’s lead single, “Rhythm of the Night.”
All that's missing are music video-style onscreen credits letting the audience know that “Rhythm of the Night” was available as a twelve inch single with a dance remix and instrumental on the b-side.
The Last Dragon is shameless about its desire to move product on the music side of the ledger, in part by casting pop star Vanity as the female lead and having her sing an entire song within her role as a music video show host and part time pop star.
Motown was not at its peak in 1985 but the film’s pre-Wu Tang Clan mash-up of black music and campy martial arts mythology was charming and fun when I was nine years old and it remains so today.
And “Rhythm of the Night” is a straight up banger. It’s one of the film’s intensely memorable elements. Another is the concept of the “The Glow”, a state of transcendence and mastery where a true master literally lights up and becomes something more than human, something beyond a mere fighter.
It’s an idea that really took hold in the culture, particularly in Hip Hop. It’s the exact opposite of how in Glass they keep tediously setting up that at some point in the film there will be a fight scene in front of a large building.
That ain’t much but I was so checked out of Glass that I kept patiently waiting for that stupid fight in front of that dumb skyscraper and it never came.
I was so angry!
The Last Dragon, in sharp contrast, sets up the concept of the Glow throughout in ways that invite excitement and feverish anticipation. Oh shit! At some point someone is going to get the Glow! And it’s going to be fucking sweet!
But the movie doesn’t actually give its hero and villain the glow until the movie is nearly over, and then for only a few minutes. Yet it’s so memorable and iconic that it feels like it takes up much more of the movie’s runtime than it actually does.
Hey it’s William H. Macy!
Taimak, a twenty-year-old black belt with no acting experience beat out the formidable like of Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, Mario Van Pebbles and Billy Blanks for the highly sought after role of hero Leroy Green.
The Last Dragon probably would have done even better and been even more of a cult movie if it had starred a genuine movie star like Fishburne instead of a novice but Taimak is an adept martial artist with a unique and compelling presence.
He’s a Bruce Lee-obsessed martial artist who has so thoroughly immersed himself in the world of martial arts that he has taken on Asian affectations in a way that today reek of cultural appropriation.
Like Lee, he’s a relatively slight, sleek man, the furthest things from a bruiser.
Cultural appropriation wasn’t as big a deal in 1985, but it was a big deal to see African-Americans and Asian-Americans in the lead roles in a studio movie instead of white folks.
That lent a certain weight to this good-natured trifle. It was representation at its goofiest, a rare opportunity to see a short, pretty young black guy with Bruce Lee aspirations and a deep love for Asian culture kick ass, get the girl and beat the big bad guy.
In a charming debut performance that promised more than it ultimately delivered, Taimak plays an ambitious, driven young man unsteadily navigating the culture divide between his mystic martial arts master’s guidance and his pizzeria-owning pop’s more grounded and worldly existence.
The young man nicknamed Bruce Leroy for his fists of fury and high-kicking ways wants to attain the state of mastery that is the Glow, defeat neighborhood arch-nemesis Sho'Nuff (Julius J. Carry) and save love interest Laura Charles (Vanity).
The enduring cult of The Last Dragon is largely the cult of Carry as Sho Nuff. The filmmakers apparently considered going with a big blaxploitation name like Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Ron O'Neal, Billy Dee Williams, or Carl Weathers but ultimately went with a lesser known character actor whose primary contribution to blaxploitation when cast in the key villain role here involved playing the iconic part of Bucky, Rudy Ray Moore’s Angel Dust-addicted nephew in The Avenging Disco Godfather.
Carry delivers a performance as big and stylized as Kabuki. It’s a dazzlingly theatrical turn from an actor nakedly pursuing immortality and attaining it before our eyes.
Rappers and other black creators like Busta Rhymes have paid reverent and extensive tribute to Sho’Nuff in their own work. If Taimak did not go on to star in a series of martial arts movies, as you might expect from his debut’s visibility and success, that might be because as appealing as he is here, Carry blows him off screen in every scene they share.
I was pleased to discover that The Last Dragon holds up nicely. It was ably directed by old pro Michael Schultz, who earned a place in the pantheon of cult film for his 1-2 1985 punch of The Last Dragon and Krush Groove but also directed 1975’s Cooley High and 1976’s Car Wash.
Of course he also directed some world class stinkers like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, Carbon Copy, The Jerk, Too and Disorderlies. The Schultz who showed up here is the confident entertainer who knows how to make the most of the winning hand he’s been dealt.
The Last Dragon was a solid box-office success that became a totally 1980s cult classic. The cross-pollination of Bruce Lee and Berry Gordy is so appealing and relatively novel that it’s surprising the movie wasn’t followed by sequels, reboots or TV adaptations.
Bruce Lee’s spirit was certainly relentlessly exploited yet The Last Dragon remains the rare beloved one-off, a big cult phenomenon that never led to anything else. There’s something special about that.
The Last Dragon never wore out its welcome with the requisite lousy sequels or remakes so if it’s squarely in your nostalgia sweet spot the way it is mine I heartily recommend taking a gloriously cheesy trip back to the Reagan era with a rock solid crowd pleaser.
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