Real-life karate black belt Taimak plays earnest young martial arts student Leroy Green, nicknamed Bruce Lee-roy by the locals. Call it a Motown martial arts movie seeped in New York urban culture and eighties color and music. Not exactly a David Lean script but, hey, it’s fast-paced with lots of laughs.Urban black culture meets Asian martial arts philosophy meets music video glamor in The Last Dragon, a colorful, comic, self-aware reworking of a classic Hong Kong martial arts odyssey in contemporary New York. When Vanity refuses to show Angela’s video on TV, Eddie threatens her and Leroy comes in to save the day and win the sexy veejay’s heart. To further the action even more, a Danny DeVito-esque video game hoodlum named Eddie (Chris Murney) is trying to get his girlfriend Angela (played by Faith Prince as an aging Cyndi Lauper) onto Vanity’s music clip TV show. Looking like some Bootsy Collins clone accompanied by a league of Road Warrior type metal-punkers, Sho‘ Nuff challenges Leroy to a fight in the movie house, but our hero slips out the side door while the Harlem hassler beats up other filmgoers. All of a sudden, in marches “the baddest, low-down mo-fo around,” the dreaded “Shogun of Harlem” called - what else? - Sho‘ Nuff. Soon afterward, Leroy is sitting in a rowdy, uptown movie theater eating popcorn with his chopsticks and watching Enter the Dragon. When the movie opens, a Japanese martial arts instructor (Thomas Ikeda) is concluding his lessons with strident pupil Taimak, whose character Leroy is frequently referred to as (ugh) “Bruce Lee-roy.” The student has “touched” the final level of his discipline, but to maintain the ultimate level he must find his perfect master and “feel the glow” envelop his body. A definite crowd pleaser with a good-natured if light-handed tone, the picture relies largely on sassy street jive, numerous below-the-belt jabs, and old-fashioned slapstick to provide the laughs.
While Dragon plainly owes a large debt to both Karate Kid and Purple Rain, this Tri-Star-distributed production settles for a mindless plot filled with low-brow humor rather than attempting any sort of ponderous message-mongering.
0 kommentar(er)
