Game of Death, Bruce Lee's most ambitious project to date, was designed to fully showcase Jeet Kune Do, the unique, fluid fighting style developed by its star; the story was to revolve around a martial artist's deadly mission to retrieve a valuable object from the top floor of a five storey pagoda, defeating a different foe in order to progress to each new level.
Although filming on Game of Death began shortly after completion of The Way of the Dragon, the production was put on hold when the star was offered the lead role in Warner Brothers' Enter the Dragon. Before the kung fu legend was able to resume work on the project, he had suffered a massive cerebral edema that tragically ended his life.
Bruce's sudden and unexpected death unsurprisingly threw a major spanner in the works of Game of Death: with 40 minutes of test footage and actual fight action in the can, but little else of use, the film sat on the shelf for three years before Enter The Dragon's director Robert Clouse was enlisted to somehow finish the film without the benefit of its main attraction.
Taking the audacious decision to radically alter the script, using 'doubles' to stand in for Bruce in most of the new scenes, Clouse eventually completed the film, which was released in 1978, five years after its star's demise. With Bruce's original storyline replaced by a dumb plot in which martial arts movie star Billy Lo (played by Lee and his stand-ins) is forced to take action against an evil racketeering syndicate that is keen to cash in on his success, and the tasteless inclusion of real footage from Lee's funeral, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that much of the movie is a total mess.
But even though Game of Death is far from the film that Lee had originally envisioned, it is still recommended viewing for kung fu fans thanks to one or two decent scraps amidst the mundane first hour or so (the bout between Sammo Hung's Lo Chen and bad guy Carl Miller, for example, is a lot of fun), excellent production values, a spiffing Bond style score courtesy of John Barry that enhances the action, suitably Bond-like opening credits, the iconic yellow tracksuit, and of course, the existing footage of the legendary pagoda sequence that makes it into the film's finale. It's definitely worth persevering through the poorly edited and exploitative dross featuring badly disguised stand-ins to witness Lee's incredible fight action at the end of the movie, the stand-out scenes being an awesome nunchuk duel and the unforgettable battle between Game of Death's diminutive star and 7'2" basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
It is these undeniably great moments that makes one wonder what might have been if only Bruce had lived to finish what he had started.
