PLOT
A plot and a martial arts movie go together like gin and soda. I mean, they just don't mix unless it's really late at night and you can't focus and you're frightened and don't care whether you live or die - anyway, the result is going to make you puke. But if you're hung up on 'the story', here's what I saw…A 'top cop' comes from Hong Kong, jets into Paris and gets involved with catching a corrupt Chinese official. Things get hairy, the official gets dusted and 'top cop' is pursued by an evil French detective who sweats more than James Brown on an Ecstasy binge. Really, that's it, and I'm being generous.

THE REVIEW
I first met Bruce Lee at a Steve McQueen party in Brentwood, California, around 1968. Lee was sitting by the pool, smoking a cigarette, laughing too much, and talking to a curvy blonde: he was trying to be as cool as Steve - but nobody was as cool as Steve, not even Joe Namath. He said that he liked my music, and I said that I liked him as Kato in the 'Green Hornet' - which was a lie, but when you hang with these people, that's the gig baby. (I recall that Jay Sebring was there, the hairdresser who worked on the 'Batman' TV series, and who later got iced by Charles Manson's gang. I talk about that party in my upcoming autobiography, 'Autumn Leaves and Dry Heaves').

When Bruce died a few years later, Steve somehow got involved with organizing the funeral in Seattle, and called me asking if I would be a pallbearer. I asked him what time the funeral started - because I'm a late riser - and then said okay Steve, but you hold the heavy end because I damaged my shoulder last week punching Jim Morrison in the neck at the Whiskey A Go-Go, which was true.

Lee had croaked by the time 'Enter the Dragon' came out in 1973. I went to see it even though I knew it was foreign. It looked like an exercise training film - a bunch of guys leaping around in pyjamas. There was no acting, no story, no nothing. The only thing I can remember is the incredible amount of hair that Chuck Norris had on his chest. I mean, it looked as if he had pasted on a cat pelt.

Anyway, here we are, about thirty years later, and there's a guy called Jet Li kicking the kidneys out of skags unlucky enough to be in this picture, which is conveniently titled 'Kiss of the Dragon'. Let's see… Jet = Bruce, Li = Lee, 'Kiss of the' = 'Enter the'… please oh freaking please, I get it, how very clever! Hey tough guys, ease up on the 'coincidences'. (By the way Jet-man, considering what happened to Bruce, you might want to switch to romantic comedies).

So we have Jet doing his thing with the chop-chop, an actor named Tcheky Karyo (the bad French cop) who equates good acting with clenching his jaw, and Bridget Fonda who plays a heroin-addicted hooker (is there any other kind in Hollywood? - oh, sorry Queen Julia) looking real spooky and sloppy with too much mascara and a weird skin tone. If she's supposed to resemble a cadaver, then hats off to the make-up man.

THE BOTTOM LINE
'Kiss of the Dragon' is about as painful as sitting through a Celine Dion concert without earplugs. (I've never done that thank jesus, but a lady friend of mine did and it cost her three months of regression analysis). You keep asking 'when's the warm-up act over?'

© 2001 IMC Communications

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