Creating an interesting biopic about the early years of one of cinema's (and modern Chinese culture's) biggest icons might seem to be a no-brainer, but directors Raymond Yip and Manfred Wong stumble here, ending up offering a film that doesn't give the audience any real insight into Bruce Lee, nor displaying any excitement around the formulative events in his life.

As far as portraying the teenaged Bruce Lee goes, Aarif Lee does a fine enough job, getting Bruce's mannerisms down without going into the realm of caricature. However, the problem is that he doesn't have much to work with. Many of the major points in Lee's early years are glossed over. The biggest example of this is Lee's training with Wing Chun master Ip Man, who himself has recently been the subject of two movies starring Donnie Yen. Not only is Ip only featured in one scene, but we don't even see his face.

Perhaps this was due to Donnie Yen's popular portrayal of the man, but at any rate, subjects like this and plenty of others are set to the side as the film-makers concentrate on elements like Bruce trying to romance his friend's girlfriend. Supposedly, what could and could not be shown in this film came into dispute, as the movie was not officially approved by Bruce Lee's estate, but one would think you could come up with something better to showcase from Bruce Lee's life than awkward teenage romance.

Also, if you are looking for action here, you're going to be disappointed. There are really only a handful of fight scenes, most of them occurring in the third act, where Bruce takes on a rival from another school (who is, in keeping with the anti-foreign sentiment currently running through Chinese and Hong Kong films, an evil white guy) and then tries to save a friend from the clutches of a group of drug dealers.

The fight scenes were obviously put in to placate the middle-of-the-road portion of the audience who would be watching this solely on the lasting strength of Bruce Lee's name, so it begs to ask, why isn't there more of Lee's trademark passion or excitement portrayed through them? As with the movie as a whole, the fight scenes do everything technically well enough, but ultimately don't offer the audience anything other than a decent way to pass away a couple of hours on a lazy weekend afternoon.

RATING: 5