FINISHING THE GAME
Rating: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Roger Fan, Sun Kang, Dustin Nguyen, Meredith Scott Lynn, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Mousa Kraish, McCaleb Burnett, James Franco, Ron Jeremy
Director: Justin Lin
Screened as part of the Reel Asian Film Festival on November 14, 2007 at the Bloor

The 11th Annual Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival kicked off last night at the Bloor with the opening night gala presentation of Justin Lin’s Finishing the Game. It was a good choice, Finishing the Game is a comedy that satirizes the 1970s frenzy to find a “successor” to the late Bruce Lee, but you don’t need to be a kung fu fan to enjoy this film.

When Bruce Lee died in 1973, he left behind some tantalizing footage for an ambitious martial arts film called The Game of Death, which is most famous for being the film in which Bruce Lee wore his iconic yellow tracksuit (and which was later worn by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). In the years following Lee’s death, an onslaught of Bruce Lee imitators with pseudonyms like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, and Dragon Lee starred in their own low-budget versions of Lee’s uncompleted film. (In 1978, Lee’s own studio, Golden Harvest, made their own ‘official’ version of the film, but it has been mostly dismissed as an embarrassment).

Finishing the Game is a faux documentary set in the 1970s about a Hollywood studio that has acquired the rights to the unfinished Game of Death footage and is setting up a search to find a stand-in actor to be Bruce Lee’s replacement in a completed version of the film. The candidates include: Breeze Loo, a cocky minor kung fu star who does none of his own stunts and who claims no direct imitation of Bruce Lee (“That cat was always wearing I yellow jumpsuit. I wear a blue one”.); Cole Kim, a talented martial artist who melts into a wimpy fanboy whenever Breeze Loo is around; Raj, and Indian doctor with dreams of being a movie star; Tarrick Tyler, a deluded wannabe who talks endlessly about being half Chinese but appears to be very Caucasian; and Troy Poon, who achieved brief stardom for his role on a high-rated cop show, but whose other roles are all “Chinese Food Delivery Boys.”

The film’s director is Justin Lin, whose debut film Better Luck Tomorrow earned strong reviews but whose subsequent efforts (including Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Annapolis) have been mostly scorned. He’s back with smart material here. Lin infuses the film with some commentary about the poor treatment of Asian actors in American cinema – at one point, a studio executive says of the Game of Death casting call, “I could go over to Chinatown and find a guy who looked like Bruce Lee in five minutes,” and Troy Poon (Dustin Nguyen) is the only character in the film to see that subbing for Bruce Lee is a poor use of Asian-American talent.

A lot of the film’s humour derives from its 1970s setting, with all the ridiculous fashions and slang of the era. Though played for laughs, the 70s milieu is actually surprisingly convincing. Even more convincing are the parodies of 70s TV shows, news reports, and especially chop socky films. We see clips from one of Breeze Loo’s films, Fists of Fuhrer, and it’s a more accurate simulation of the grindhouse atmosphere than Grindhouse was.

Finishing the Game is structured in a faux-documentary format, and it’s obvious that Lin has studied the films of Christopher Guest, right down to the where-are-they-now epilogue. Like A Mighty Wind or Waiting for Guffman, Finishing the Game is chiefly about disappointed people with high ambitions and sometimes delusions of grandeur. If it’s not as consistently funny as the best of Guest’s films, it has a lot of the qualities that made them so good. Finishing the Game has already received a limited theatrical release in the United States, and will be released on DVD shortly. It’s good fun, and worth a rental.