SPIRITS OF BRUCE LI


Spirits of Bruce Li



Year: 1979
AKA: Spirits of Bruce Lee
Starring: Michael Chan Wai Man, Sun Chia Ling, Poon Lok, Wong Tip Lan, Chan Fei Hung
Directed by: Shang Lung


The official synopsis from the box:

"Richard Lee sets off for Wansen, a small town at the boundary between Burma and Thailand to look for his brother Robert Lee. Richard saw a young Thai assaulted by several hoodlums on the way. Urged by righteousness, he helped the young Thai and kicked off the latters. The young Thai was to be a boxing tutor in a rich merchant's house, they made friends with admiration to each other. The next day they reached Wansen, a place with strange customs, neither controlled by Thai nor the Burmese government...Michael Chan - the champion boxer of South-East Asia demonstrates his terrific kung fu! Fierce Fighting! Exciting Challenge! Box office hit!"
Damn, do you get the feeling from that synopsis that whomever wrote it only watched the first 20 minutes and fudged it from there? "A place of strange customs?" Not really, unless you consider talking about coffee a lot as strange. Richard and Robert Lee? The two characters are never called those names; they are called Chan Cheng Wei and Chan Cheng Pung. I guess that sounds close to Richard and Robert. Regardless, SPIRITS OF BRUCE LI has nothing to do with Bruceploitation and is pretty weak all around.

Chan Cheng Wei (Michael Chan Wai Man) heads to Thailand to search for his missing brother. Seems his brother went there to buy some jade but never returned. By good fortune, Chan runs into an old man whose son and daughter witnessed the murder. "What a tragic coincidence we met," says the old man. Yeah, what are the odds? Even better, Chan takes the old man's daughter to a festival and notices someone hawking his dead brother's watch at a card game. Damn, this dude is lucky. Chan follows the guy and beats the info out of him and a friend to reveal the mastermind behind the murder is local baddie Me Pan Tin. Hey, that is the same dude Chan's Thai kickboxing buddy is working for! Damn, this dude is the luckiest man on earth. So Chan launches an all out assault on Me Pan Tin and his henchmen that results in lots of fatalities, including the death of Chan's new friend the old man. Damn, what happened to all his luck?

For the most part, this movie is weak. The first 45 minutes are boring and features the most amount of coffee talk I have ever seen in my life. Characters keep talking about coffee like it is something new. "Sit down and have some coffee!" "Hey, you want some coffee?" "Let's go inside where we can have some coffee." The coffee in Thailand must be some good shit. Not much in the way of good fighting, but there is a really good bit where a guy is thrown off a cliff. The dummy looks really good, almost as good as coffee! There is also a really fancy dialogue exchange between Chan and his would be lover as she dresses his knife wound:

Girl: Dad said if it had gone any deeper, it would have penetrated the bone. If it had, you probably would have been a cripple for the rest of your life.
Chan: I don't care whether I'm crippled or not.
Girl: Oh? Why not?
Chan: I mean that if you could be with me the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind being a cripple at all.

WOW! What a nice guy. Nothing more romantic than saying you want a chick to care for you while you are crippled. Surprisingly, he gets the girl but then again, we all know chicks chose the wrong guys.

Reviewed by William.