Updated on Sep 8, 2018. Originally written and posted on Sep 28, 2016.
Bruce Lee (played by rising Hong Kong Kung Fu star Philip Ng), the legendary martial arts icon who changed the world, is depicted as a one-dimensional, asexual, awkward loser who is jealous of the white guy in "Birth of the Dragon", a new biographical film.
A biographical film about BRUCE LEE. Wow. What a disaster.
Hong Kong Kung Fu actor Philip Ng
The white guy - Steve McKee - is supposed to be the main character of the film and central to the story... um, yeah right. We don't know who that is, and neither do we know who the actor who plays him is (Billy Magnussen?), but you know what, he's white, so that must make him extremely important and vital to the story in Bruce Lee's life, right?!
I don't know who this man is, but apparently, he's more famous than Bruce Lee.
We purposely did not include a link to the film's trailer in this article, because we refuse to give the trailer any more hits. If you wish, you can find it on YouTube.
Click here to read a mainstream review of Birth of the Dragon written by Yahoo.
From our understanding, Birth of the Dragon is supposed to be a film about Bruce Lee's earlier years in America and his fight with Kung Fu master Wong Jack Man - who changed him forever and set him along the path of inventing Jeet Kune Do and the philosophies behind MMA... or is it just another clichéd White Savior Trope film where a "down on his luck loser" learns Kung Fu and saves the world (including the Asian girl)?
We've never seen this story told before... right?
What the people are saying:
Let's see the user-written reviews on IMDb. The responses are not pretty. If you're not comfortable with honest discussions about race, look away! You have been warned.
"This is just a fictional story about a white guy who masters Kung Fu and gets the Chinese woman." - ridgepoor
In real life, Bruce Lee ended up marrying a white girl. He was discriminated against by many white men and had to work hard to be a superstar. You went to Princeton University, don't you think that you should have done some research about this character first? Didn't they teach you to be critical? This isn't a movie about Bruce Lee, this is a movie about your racist imagination. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MAKING AN ASIAN GUY BECOME THE LEAD ACTOR IN A MOVIE? Enough is enough, we Asians are already sick of the whole whitewashing thing.
George Nolfi - the director of the white savior film Birth of the Dragon, and Matt Damon, starring in the upcoming white savior film The Great Wall. Coincidence?
"This film seriously offends me." - chrisleeisworking
I wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen!! This is cash grab garbage, crock of shit. The director has turned Bruce Lee into a caricature. This is spitting on the memory of Bruce Lee. As a loyal fan of Bruce Lee and as an Asian, this film seriously offends me. ENOUGH! We in the Asian communities will make sure this film earns ZERO dollars. The script is shockingly dull and absurd, the fight scenes aren't exceptional, the stunt guy who plays Bruce Lee captures zero essence of Bruce Lee, his acting pure ham. The director should go back to writing to spare us further torture. BIRTH OF THE DRAGON is NOT sanctioned by the Lee family!
"Oh no please no." - chrisli
Bruce Lee would impart political themes in his films. If you ever watch his Hong Kong movies in original Cantonese language, the script is full of political fighting talk. Its another reason why the people of Hong Kong loved him so much, or the Chinese in general. His characters he played in those films were real heroic figures for the people at the time. No wonder this film didn't get the blessing of the Bruce Lee foundation / family. I hope the Chinese investors realize this, that they could have had a really great project...but no.
"Hollywood racism galore." - bawlife
Film reduces Bruce Lee into a side character in his own story to force a white guy into the lead. Why is the main focus of the trailer on this silly white American dude? Asian males can never take the lead role. Only the side kick even in their own movie. It is disgusting. White people, would it kill you to stop inserting yourselves into everything? And of course the white guy is dating the Asian girl. Can you stop socially engineering Asian girls to only see white guys as the acceptable dating partner? Stop shoving this down our throat. A white guy kisses an Asian girl. Every movie. It's like they want to brainwash us that Asian girls belong to white men. This turns into a sickening Asian fetish in real life.
"I never write reviews for anything, but this time I absolutely had to." - nightmarephoenix
Bruce Lee curses the filmmakers for attempting to destroy his legacy with this garbage.
Anti-Asian propaganda?
Ken Jeong, another sellout "comedian" who perpetuates racist Asian stereotypes for his own personal gain as an actor at the expense of Asians.A few users mentioned a media database that captures more examples of Hollywood anti-Asian racism in their media - Kulture Media.
Well, we didn't need to look at a site like Kulture Media to know about the whitewashing of Asian stories and general anti-Asian propaganda that was, is, and continues to be perpetuated by Hollywood / America for the better part of a century.
All we need to do is open our eyes (pun intended) and look at the movies that get made (and exported worldwide) at the expense of Asians (especially Asian men):
- Ghost In The Shell (main character Motoko Kusanagi is whitewashed and played by Scarlett Johansson)
- Aloha (Allison Ng, a Chinese character is played by Emma Stone)
- 21 (real-life story of Asian MIT students are replaced with white actors)
- Romeo Must Die (Romeo and Juliet story except Jet Li doesn’t even kiss Aaliyah)
- The Forbidden Kingdom (only a white guy who learns Kung Fu can save China and the Asian girl from evil)
- Outcast (white Crusaders come and save China and the Asian girl from an evil Chinese prince)
- The Wolverine (every Asian guy is useless and dies, while Wolverine saves all the Asian women, uses them for sex, but goes back home to a white girl he actually loves)
- Full Metal Jacket ("me so horny me love you long time")
- The Last Airbender (all the ethnic heroes are replaced with white people, but the villains remain ethnic)
- The Man With The Iron Fists (all Asian women are sexualized prostitutes)
- The Last Samurai (a white guy goes to Japan, kills your brother in law, sleeps with your sister, and beats your best friend in a sword fight after only training for a few months, and saves Japan)
- 47 Ronin (only a mixed Asian born from a white father can save the princess, the other 47 ronin are apparently useless)
- Red Dawn (Chinese are evil, but they actually watch Hollywood movies so let’s make them North Korean instead)
- Dragonball Evolution (Let’s make Goku a white guy but keep the Asian girl in it)
- Pacific Rim (only a white guy can save the world and protect those poor helpless Asians - Asian guys are useless and they die. Even though the Asian girl is portrayed as somewhat strong [only after guidance from non-Asian men], it still comes at the expense of Asian men, who are easily beaten down by the Asian woman who only sees the white guy as someone worthy of her attention / love)
- Iron Man 3 (The Mandarin is a wimp instead of a badass villain)
- The Hangover (Asian penis jokes, slandering Asian men and perpetuating a false stereotype)
- Sixteen Candles (Long Duk Dong, the emasculated Asian nerd who is the laughing stock of his whole generation)
- Breakfast At Tiffany's (that old bucktoothed angry Asian man played in yellowface)
- Entourage (Lloyd, the gay fat comedic Asian, directed and produced by Mark Wahlberg, who is famous for his hate crime of beating up a Vietnamese man until he was blinded while calling him "Vietnam fucking shit" and throwing stones at a group of black kids while calling them the N-word)
- 2 Broke Girls (Matthew Moy, another fat Asian nerd / perpetual foreigner character who can't get women)
- Make It Pop (3 Asian girls with 1 white guy in a kid's TV show about Korean pop group, while the TV producer of the show infamously proclaimed in a boardroom meeting "No Asian Guys In My Show"! A show designed to be watched by kids)
- The Interview (white guys go to a poor Asian country to make fun of / kill Asian guys while having sex with Asian women, while the supreme leader of North Korea is actually another emasculated idiot who secretly dreams of being American but is also useless and dies)
- The Great Wall (China gets The Last Samurai treatment, starring Matt Damon)
- No Escape (white family moves to Thailand, realizes some Asians are terrorists, proceeds to escape the country while using poor local Asians as meat shields)
- Star Trek: Beyond (The character of Sulu played by John Cho has recently been turned gay, even though the original actor who played Sulu and LGBTQ activist George Takei protested against turning his character gay)
- The Outsider (The Last Samurai... again... this time starring Jared Leto as the central character, a Yakuza member in Japan)
- To All The Boys I've Loved Before (Gendered racism - a movie showing an Asian female character who only falls in love with non-Asian boys, an Asian boy is never seen)
...and the list goes on and on.
There are many more examples, but you get the point... we hope.
Bruce Lee sees your bullshit, and he ain't impressed.
Now, contrast the premise of Birth of the Dragon with the biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story made just a few decades earlier:
In this film clip, Bruce Lee (played by Jason Scott Lee) is upset to see Asians portrayed so negatively in movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany's. His white girlfriend realizes how messed up this is and asks to leave the theatre with Bruce.
Boy, now that is a world of a difference.
Hollywood tells us that only white people matter
In today's trend (or rather it's always been like this) of filmmaking and storytelling, society is brainwashed to think Asians can never be leaders or important because it always takes a "white male protagonist" in order to "get the audience to relate to him" because he's white. The same old "it would be a box office disaster if an Asian was the lead actor" excuse made by Hollywood film studios and producers.
You can relate to Marco Polo...
This same tired formula / plot device is used for shows on Netflix like Marco Polo and Narcos, where instead of focusing on a foreign person whether Mongolian or Colombian as the central character, it has to be told through the lens of a white person. Does it really help the storytelling? Or is it more of a hindrance?
You can relate with an American DEA agent...
... and you can relate with me, even though I'm just generated by a computer...
Gee, last time I checked, white people could relate with animated Disney / Pixar characters and CGI blue-skinned aliens just fine.
But relating to *gasp*... Asians? No way! Impossible! Asians aren't human, they don't speak American, they should all go back to China! Ching chong! Am I doing this racism thing right?
Sure, the films were campy classics, but fans loved it because they at least stayed faithful to the source material. Birth of the Dragon, it is not.
Socially-engineered Hollywood racism & dehumanization needs to stop
But why was this myth created in the first place? By now, let's just call it what it is: good old-fashioned racism.
Wait, that's not how it went down, but really, we do get it. We're not stupid.
The predominantly white / Jewish owned Hollywood studios don't want to tell real stories of other minorities, giving them representation and power. They want to keep the money and resources within their own communities and keep fueling their propaganda brainwashing machine.
Bruce Lee fans lose out on a modern retelling of his legendary story
When Bruce Lee's own television script Kung Fu was stolen by Warner Bros. and subsequently whitewashed by David Carradine (who would have been a nobody without Bruce Lee), he flew back to Hong Kong to make his own films that showed the world he could be a true leading man, and not a sidekick.
Remembering the real Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee and wife Linda Lee.
It is obvious to us that Hollywood is trying extra hard these days to omit or belittle Asians in the media. We're just shocked to find that they would dare try to erase the accomplishments of the legendary Bruce Lee and what he represented - strong Asian masculinity and sexuality - effectively trying to erase prominent Asian heroic figures off the face of popular culture altogether.
Regardless if its the economic rise and threat of China, or pure vile hate and jealousy, one thing is clear: Hollywood is ramping up its not-so-subtle anti-Asian propaganda campaign, further regulating us to sidekicks, nerds, geeks, and emasculated asexuals (even in our own biographical pictures) promoting a falsified history of Asians (and engineering our society as a result).
If you need a refresher on who Bruce Lee was, just read the many articles about him online, his many fantastic groundbreaking martial arts films, and the many documentaries that have featured him. We won't attempt to recap that here.
Bruce Lee, however, was anything but an emasculated, asexual, frustrated jerk. He defied the odds, rebelled from traditional norms and mainstream society, and carved out his own legacy (even when Hollywood first tried to shaft him) that not only inspired millions of people around the world - he was a symbol for Chinese and Asian pride.
We should remember the real legacy of Bruce Lee, and not the sidekick freak show version fabricated by Hollywood today.