Sunday, August 1, 2021

The Last Dragon (1985)

IMDb plot summary: In New York City, a young man searches for a Master to obtain the final level of martial arts mastery known as the Glow.
Directed by Michael Schultz. Starring Taimak, Vanity, Christopher Murney, and Julius Carry.

This is not a terribly clear narrative. What it is is a love letter to older martial arts movies. It clearly loves them so much and wants to do its own version with a Black lead, and it's mostly successful in that. The characters are drawn in very broad strokes in the sense that you can gather who is "good" and "bad," even if their motives are a bit muddier. It's got quite a few moments that made me chuckle, particularly as our naive lead character interacts inside of his sort of "zen martial arts master persona," and the moments when those cross paths with the real world are charmingly goofy. I haven't yet mentioned our other antagonist, who I believe is a rival martial artist gang leader, who really takes on an outlandish larger-than-life quality every time he and his entourage appear on screen. None of this is my genre, really, but I enjoy what it tries to do and it makes me smile.

How it entered my Flickchart:
The Last Dragon > Fahrenheit 451
The Last Dragon < Safe
The Last Dragon < Charlie St. Cloud
The Last Dragon < Real Life
The Last Dragon < Drunken Master
The Last Dragon < Captain Phillips
The Last Dragon > Vampyr
The Last Dragon < Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
The Last Dragon > Cambio de ruta
The Last Dragon > The Anderson Tapes
The Last Dragon < The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair
Final spot: #1669 out of 3412, or 51%.

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