The Last Dragon

It is difficult to imagine a more delirious pastiche than The Last Dragon, a film in which a youthful martial-arts movie in the mould of The Karate Kid comes together with a 1980s TV variety show, sitcom caricature, blaxploitation, new-age mysticism, cartoonish bad guys, a Bruce Lee monument and the style of early MTV. Surprisingly, however, all of these disparate elements fit together, though the intended result is deliberately less than serious. Thanks to exaggeration and the willingness to constantly take the piss out of itself, the film surpasses seriously intended yet ridiculously cringe-inducing guilty pleasures such as No Retreat, No Surrender and The Karate Kid. The protagonist here is a real martial-arts champion, unlike the whippersnappers who are barely able to stand on one leg. Though The Last Dragon makes fun of the clichés of martial-arts movies and their esoteric pearls of wisdom, it also rather sincerely highlights the benefits of martial arts and pays homage to Bruce Lee. We can find the roots of this notable approach in the martial-arts blaxploitation films starring Jim Kelly, which also often abound with genre excess, but at the same time were based on the perception of martial arts as a way to defend one’s rights and a means to win respect and to assert one’s emancipation. After all, it was due to these values that Bruce Lee became a major icon of African-Americans’ struggle for equality. The Last Dragon actually represents a unique comingling of two diametrically different positions of African-American parallel pop culture – the trash genre movies of the 1970s and the mainstream sitcoms and comedies of the 1980s. Thanks to that, an idealistic martial-arts master, his brother, who still has milk running down his chin and is already spouting ultra-macho lines, a stunningly beautiful music-show host longing for love, and a comically affected bad guy called the Shogun of Harlem with his posse of punks can appear side by side in the same film. And that’s not even to mention the parallel storyline with the evil white magnate who characteristically has no taste in music, and his protégé bimbo mistress, who, like all white people, has no rhythm and performs terrifying song-and-dance routines. It is not in any way surprising that the project was backed by the influential African-American music label Motown, which had previously produced The Wiz, a black variation on The Wizard of Oz. (2015.09.03)