To return to a tired point, Seven Samurai has so many remakes because its story is universal and omni-applicable. Peeking ahead at the titles of these remakes, one (i.e. me) assumes each “entry” is from a different nation, each one readapting the Seven Samurai tale to local conditions. Hence the U.S. made The Magnificent Seven as a western. The second remake, Kill a Dragon, then appears to be a martial arts, kung fu variation…if you squint hard enough.
My assumption that these movies would all hail from different nations turns out to be very wrong, for a mere magnificent 7 years after Magnificent Seven, the U.S. made another remake, without even the decency to outright own up to their inspiration. Kill a Dragon IS a Seven Samurai remake, but that’s not all there is to it.
Allow a characteristic detour. In 1973, not quite 7 years after Kill a Dragon, Enter the Dragon was produced. It is a major milestone in the history of the martial arts movie, for many reasons. It is the last complete performance of legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, and represents what many consider the first joint film production between the U.S. and Hong Kong. This was in response to a general renaissance in China’s film output starting in the late ‘60s, not only Lee’s own Fists of Fury and his other Fists of Fury, but also the concentrated efforts of the Shaw Brothers. Wuxia movies flourished domestically, and once they traveled abroad to American audiences, the ‘70s and ‘80s were awash in the subgenre, even in light of Lee’s bizarre death.
How does this relate to Kill a Dragon? Well, though it is clearly a Hollywood product, it was itself filmed in Hong Kong, with significant help from the Chinese behind the camera. But let’s not for a single minute falsely think Kill a Dragon might be decent, as it plays rather like an American impression of what a Hong Kong movie might be like, without ever having seen one. So while the filmmakers may have known about China’s emphasis upon the fight scene, they respond with some truly uninspired fisticuffsmanship of the stagnant American variety. Oh, and the whole thing is a vaguely xenophobic bit of Oriental exoticism, with a “mighty whitey” subtext. Really, it’s almost like what Enter the Dragon would be like if you removed Bruce Lee…and John Saxon…and Jim Kelly…and Robert Clouse…and just about everything else that makes it a classic.
As a nascent Hollywood bastardization of Asian wuxia, there’s even a funky theme song! Actual lyrics: “Psychedelic, let’s get swirly. Whoooooooooo! Kill a dragon!” That is the best part of the movie.
Oh right, and there’s that Seven Samurai connection too! That provides the framework for the plotline, how an impoverished Chinese island village off the coast of Hong Kong is under siege by the assuredly villainous smuggler Nico Patrai (Fernando Lamas, from TV…oh God, I’m sensing a trend!). First up, Patrai invades the hamlet, and issues an arbitrary 3-day deadline before he promises to kills ‘em all outright, indirectly suggesting that the village go and acquire some protectors on those 3 days.
Now…I’ll address this early. The reasons for this village-related terrorism are astoundingly foolish. Patrai wants a…something which the villagers are hiding. We later learn it is his latest “cargo” – this vague term persists for half the film, making me think the innocent townsfolk were hoarding heroin or opium, their eyes fixed on a fix. Well, it eventually turns out to be nitroglycerin, which is a way to justify Third Act explosions – but not enough explosions, considering… Anyway, the villagers want to sell Patrai’s inexplicably lost nitro, which is legally his (good guys!), and they’re willing to risk village-wide devastation to do this. It’s not even portrayed as, say, a financial necessity. They’re just being greedy, and this isn’t even the sort of film to make an asset out of its contradictions. It’s just that thick-headed.
Three villagers – I could guess as to their (and the actors’) names, but the Chinese are treated with so little dignity it hardly seems worth the effort – row out to Hong Kong to seek succor from, um…whomever. Sorry about all this vagueness, that’s a problem of the movie. Patrai is watching the island, so he immediately knows about this, and instantly sends some off disposable mooks. And with the “innocents” guileless in their quest, they completely at random stumble into the sexnasium junk of expat Rick Masters (Jack Palance, whose surprisingly decent career in no way suggests headlining this mess) – and the name “Masters” is surely an unsubtle hint that this guy ’ll be leading the eventual group of warriors.
Masters masters the mooks mercilessly (but not magnificently), with fight moves that are more “barroom brawl” than “kung fu craziness.” Which does not jibe at all with the over-generous travelogue style applied to the Hong Kong setting. Seriously, Kill a Dragon plays as though Americans had just discovered Hong Kong (and China as a whole), and could be sated with nothing more than overlong shots of junk yards (i.e. boat neighborhoods). Hell, they even repeatedly employ a sickening technique where a travel guide leads mouth-agape Caucasians throughout Darkest Orient, complete with unironic dialogue about the “ancient, mystical culture,” and other such condescension.
That tour guide winds up being one of the jerks Masters coerces into action – their job not quite being village defense, as one would expect, but rather a nitro salvage operation. Though that will indirectly necessitate village defense anyway, so I don’t know why they’re trying to create a less interesting scenario out of all this. This tour guide is Vigo (Aldo Ray – wait, wasn’t that Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds?!). See anything here? Eh, probably not in type. I’ll spell it out: These guys are all white! Why, in all of China, no one is more likely to help out an impoverished village than almighty Anglos, guys whose estimation of this “impenetrable” culture boils down to referring to Confucius and fortune cookies again and again. I’m serious. God DAMN IT! [Slams head on desk.]
Amongst the rest of the team Masters musters, we somehow go even whiter, with genuine British stereotype Ian (Don Knight). But to round out the diversity just a tad, included free with Ian is an honest-to-goodness Asian, Jimmy (Hans Lee, of…nothing else). And because it’s 1967, no points for assuming that not only is Jimmy the first to die, he’s the only one to die. Minority and all. But that’s an idiotic moment to come.
And…that’s it! There are no other teammates, just those four. That’s…variation, I guess, to intentionally under deliver on not just Seven Samurai, but the whole “men on a mission” subgenre. There’s not even any genuine characterization for most of these guys…eh, except for Masters, and then I can’t even get a bead on what his personality is. But we’ll get to that later as well…
Meanwhile, we can claim 7 heroes, if we count the three villagers who did the recruiting. But this is such funky bookkeeping, just to satisfy a point Kill a Dragon doesn’t seem particularly concerned with.
It takes a long time for these 7 – or 4 – to make their goddamned way back to Unspellable Island. The recruitment section is quite leisurely paced, which is in keeping with the source material. But to no end, as there’s no content. Director Michael Moore – no, not that one – this Michael Moore was – Holy crap! – he was assistant director on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (well, all three Indiana Jones movies – yeah, I’m not counting Crystal Skull), along with several other notable blockbusters (also Ishtar). So he clearly got better at directing, for his approach here is static and languorous to a damningly huge degree, as if the 90 minutes of interminable running time couldn’t fill themselves out. This means lotsa cutting back and forth between the same two shots repeatedly, filling out scenes with no dialogue, no action, no nothing (there’s a nitro loading scene later on which particularly suffers from this). I’m actually amazed Moore later did decent work, because this movie sucks.
Anyway, we’re on the island now. Masters starts up a romance with a local, because all other such movies have done likewise. There is no understanding of the why of anything in Seven Samurai. Kill a Dragon doesn’t even know how to work on a basic dramatic level, creating tension out of struggling to prevent imminent attack from Patrai and his goons (never mind the fact they could just give Patrai the nitro he BOUGHT).
I’m not really sure what the thought process is for a single character here. The villagers and Masters’ minions all just want to smuggle away the nitro, and sell it. This ignores the fact Patrai will explode their island (oh yes!) if they do so. Nope, no thought about defense is ever evidently considered. Patrai, meanwhile, has the entire island under surveillance, and blockaded, but still not a single one of his henchmen notices when the islanders all obviously load the nitro onto a junk (below). (Oh, and attempts to create “suspense” via nitro ala The Wages of Fear? They don’t work.)
Of that blockade, and I realize I’m skipping around as it interests me, but so be it. When the 4 (or 7) make it to the island, they get past this impenetrable blockade – through cross-dressing! Yeah, Vigo puts on a drag outfit less convincing than Eddie Izzard, and apparently Patrai’s underlings are horny enough to fall for it! This is another of the more successful sequences, which is just flabbergasting. You’d think at least watching Seven Samurai would yield better moviemaking than Kill a Dragon boasts.
Another random observation: The title. Repeatedly, Chinese villagers compare Masters to St. George, who slew the dragon. Oh sure, that’s something all isolated, dirt poor Asians know, right? This seems all like more Anglo adoration.
Shall we compound how…unclear everyone’s motivations are? Oh, let’s! Patrai heads on over to the island, doesn’t see the nitro there in the big boat in the harbor, and invites Masters for a casual chat. There is, on top of uninformed wuxia mimicry, a bit of low key James Bond navel gazing – another similarity between this and Enter the Dragon – with the Masters/Patrai meetings being the “dinner with the villain” bit. Or trying to be. It seems Patrai is fascinated – fascinated – with Masters’ mindset. I’ve seen nothing to warrant this. He calls Masters “complicated,” which he’s not quite. “Incomprehensible,” yes, not “complicated.” Same as “Finnegans Wake.”
Patrai offers Masters a deal – give Patrai the nitro, and he’ll give Masters 1/3rd of the “profits,” whatever those are. Hell, it’s the exact same deal Masters has with the villagers. He equivocates, but will eventually turn Patrai down. This is all because Masters suspects Patrai would just as well kill Masters as pay him – and we’ve seen no evidence Patria might be treasonous. Masters is just arbitrarily calling the villagers “good” and Patrai “bad,” because God forbid there be any depth to this shit.
Now, for even more reasons I cannot fathom, mastermind Masters mentors moving the nitro yet again, this time to a busted up and beached boat with a hole in it. Why?! Seriously, why?! Eh…it’ll be “easier” to smuggle this way. Okay, sure, whatever. And now Jimmy dies, not at the hands of Patrai et al, oh no, but due to simple idiocy. He lays underneath the unstable boat in order to patch it; it crushes him. Huh? You know, it’s hard to route for Masters here when the only “good guy” death is due to his own ignorance of OSHA guidelines, and all the other deaths to date are random goons he’s murdered in cold blood. I’m talkin’ “shot in the back” cold blood. And again, with no irony of self-consciousness to any of this. Our heroes!
Then Masters has another meeting with Patrai. I am completely beyond trying to parse out what I see on screen anymore. The last time they debated, Patrai proposed a casual, friendly game of Russian roulette. As you do. The hell?! They equate pointless suicide with bravery, which – Hey, there’s a Japanese idea Seven Samurai neglected! Well, this time Masters returns the suicidal favor, and proposes, um, shooting a six-shooter six times at a box of nitroglycerin a full three feet away. This is like Russian roulette with a landmine. With one bullet in the chamber, Patrai finally stops Masters after five attempts. Would that a statistician could say how much of a risk of death Masters ran there already, to prove an inexplicable point about being a hardass or some such.
Oh, and there was no trick either. There was a real bullet in the chamber, and it was real nitro. Masters shows Patrai so much, exploding the local sea life with it instead of themselves. So…I guess it’s a metaphor for the apparently imminent final showdown, but I dunno.
That final showdown has the same degree of inexplicability. It isn’t even remotely engaging as a ‘60s action sequence, surely not to anyone familiar with The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare or any of the more kickass examples. And Patrai lives, somehow OK with his being taken hostage, and with the murder (coldblooded) of countless undeserving goons. We simply have to accept he won’t go back and kill off the whole village later for the sheer hell of it. Actually, Patrai allows Masters to sell the nitro, profit from it alone, then simply congratulates him for a game well played. Again, not “complicated,” “incomprehensible.”
The end.
There’s not much greater observation to be gotten from Kill a Dragon. It offers no new insights into Seven Samurai, surely not in the way the classic Magnificent Seven did. It doesn’t cleverly recontextualize the story, and the whole nitro thing is too awkward to qualify. There is no clever treatment of the human condition, of the setting, nothing Seven Samurai excelled at – and perhaps unfairly I’m holding this disposable late ‘60s entertainment to the lofty standards of international cinema’s shining star.
But even in the unrelated wuxia argument, Kill a Dragon is a wash. It works almost wholly in that context as a curiosity, a little bit of context for Enter the Dragon. Actually, I’m done here; I’m gonna go randomly watch Enter the Dragon now, and then not blog about it.
RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• Nos. 4 - 8 (1979 - 1993)
• No. 9 China Gate (1998)
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