Bruce Lee: The Legend Lives On (1999) Reviews

• Some quality interviews here, but a lot of padding too

  Leofwine_draca2016-05-31

  MEMORIES OF BRUCE LEE - aka BRUCE LEE: THE LEGEND LIVES ON - is a short documentary that explores the life and times of the famous martial arts star. In essence what this is is a collection of talking head interview footage as various people who knew Lee in real life talk about their experiences of him both as a person and a star. Said interview clips are rather terse, but there's a wide variety of people involved, from fellow martial artists who trained with Lee to big-name film stars like Jackie Chan and James Coburn. I don't suppose that there's a whole lot here that fans won't already know, as this is designed as a primer for newcomers so it feels quite superficial and straightforward. What I didn't appreciate was the quality of the clips used to illustrate Lee's career in the movies. They're okay at first, but in the second half of this documentary the interview footage becomes more sparse and it's just one lousy quality fight clip after another. The quality of these clips is so poor that you can barely see what's going on. It smacks of laziness, as if the interview footage ran out so they just padded the documentary out with clips until the end.