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Bruce Lee
PostMagArts & Music
Stephen McCarty
Stephen McCarty

What a view | Bruce Lee’s Warrior: martial arts master would have approved of Justin Lin’s stylish adaptation

  • The Fast and the Furious director makes Lee’s TV proposal for a series about a martial artist wandering frontier America a reality
  • British-Japanese kung fu fighter Andrew Koji leads a cast of strong characters into slick, action-packed fight scenes

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Andrew Koji as Ah Sahm in Warrior, a martial arts series based on the writings of Bruce Lee. Photo: HBO
Stephen McCarty
Discovering “new” work by the mighty Bruce Lee must have been akin to finding out that Elvis never left the building after all. Imagine coming across an untapped, adaptation-ripe television-show pitch written by a pop-culture colossus: pay dirt.
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It’s well documented that Lee’s daughter Shannon found a proposal for a series featuring a martial-arts master wandering frontier Americaamong her father’s papers and took it to film director Justin Lin. Equally notable is that the 10-instalment result, Warrior, is justifying the hype again surrounding the god of hand-to-hand combat, from its 10am Saturday slot on HBO Go, repeated at 10pm.

Beginning in the lightly civilised San Francisco of 1878, the story follows fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant Ah Sahm (British-Japanese Shaolin kung fu fighter Andrew Koji) as he tracks down a mystery woman. Ah Sahm (the “Bruce Lee” of the enterprise) reluctantly peels off from the downtrodden, despised and racially abused “coolies” – there to make America great – his fists of fury elevating him to soldier in the vicious Chinatown tong wars. History’s most romanticised drug soon becomes the crux of the bloody conflicts: “opium is the future”, announces one forward-looking putative gang leader.

The California of the series is a stylised yet believable version built in Cape Town, but little suspension of belief is required anyway, given the strength of cast and character: a silky Olivia Cheng as brothel madam Ah Toy, who’s not averse to wielding a flashing blade herself; Kieran Bew as a violent, racist police officer (imagine that); Dean Jagger as a thuggish leader of Chinese-baiting Irish labourers; and Dianne Doan as the scheming opium visionary.

Its South African element notwithstanding, Warrior aims for authenticity in the harsh life of the Chinese immigrant, down to the use, alongside English, of three dialects (including Cantonese). The spectacular it saves for its set pieces: one-on-one or mob-handed fight scenes, which spare neither blood nor gore and cheerfully suggest Gangs of New York gone west, channelled through Quentin Tarantino. Big boss Bruce would have approved.

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