[Film Criticism] On 'The Last Dragon (1985)

A Great Romance Smuggled Inside The First Hip-Hop Kung-Fu Film

The Last Dragon was the first Kung-Fu movie I watched, but it wasn’t a Kung-Fu film. It was likely the first time I saw Bruce Lee, but it wasn’t a Bruce Lee movie. And it wasn’t the first time this 11-year-old had fallen in love on-screen. The Last Dragon is a beautiful lie that gets you in the end. You think it’s a fighting movie, but it’s a romantic hero’s journey, where the end goal is not a combat victory but a devotional commitment of love. Mastery is the quest of The Last Dragon, and therefore, this essay's theme seeks to briefly examine this film’s eternal mastery, as measured by the joy I have received re-watching it over time.

The plot of this movie is the same as most fighting films, except for three unique factors. In the deceptively apparent primary storyline, a skilled young warrior has reached the final test of his life’s potential. He has grown beyond the instruction of his current Master. He must find “The Ultimate Master,” and enemies will stand in his way while he tests his skills against the best to defeat them all and prove his worth to the Master as the greatest warrior in mid-1980s Harlem (which is the boundary of the known universe in this film).

But here are where those three unique factors of this film come into play, distinguishing this movie from all its peers and creating a legendary work of art that has stood the test of time.

1. Intertextuality: This is where one work of art references another, either explicitly or sub-textually.¹ The Last Dragon’s story lives between the birth of Commercial Hip-Hop and the titanic rise of music video storytelling on MTV. The “Vee-Jay” (Video Disc Jockey) seemed to be all-powerful. The Last Dragon tells a different story, cartooned in colorized punches and kicks, about how power was distributed throughout the entertainment industry of its time. Throw in the little bald white dictator/promoter who encourages violence between poor people over what colors their hands glow, and you have the music business in 1985.²

2. Bruce Lee: This is a specific form of intertextuality, unique to this film because it fuses Hip-Hop culture on screen with Kung-Fu culture.³ Using Bruce Lee’s films creates a mystical environment that permeates every level of The Last Dragon. Bruce Lee is presented as a fighter who gains the mastery that Leroy seeks. On the surface of combat storytelling, it’s about who can overpower the other, and this is presented as the primary arena of challenge for our hero, Leroy Green. But flipping, kicking, punching, and screaming is not how our hero will prove his worth and gain the mastery he seeks. 

For most of this movie, this viewer believed the end of Leroy’s quest involved the best fighter physically glowing with either red or green power, depending on the fighter’s moral alignment (a potential intertextual reference to Return Of The Jedi’s lightsabers). However, this fighting quest is a ruse that allows the storytellers to position the deceptive secondary storyline, which ends up providing the moral purpose for this film that has allowed it to remain relevant long past the time of music videos and 808-powered Hip Hop. This brings us to The Last Dragon's third (arguably most important) distinguishing factor.

3. Laura Charles (played with mastery by Denise Matthews / “Vanity”). She is beautiful. She is powerful in influencing her audience. She inspires devotion. She can sing, rap, dance in just one show. The way that Laura falls in love on screen is visual, written in photons by her eyes, her smile, and the tilt of her head with its wild hair streaming out like a celebration of a life lived outside of street combat. Her devotion is the glow that Leroy seeks through mastering fighting. Laura Charles falling in love with a strong but flawed man is why I watched this movie over fifty times as a child when it aired on HBO.⁴

As an 11-year-old boy, I was in love with Laura Charles on-screen when I was still a bit too young to have discovered how to physically gratify the strong emotions I felt when engaging with pleasing images of the opposite sex. I had nowhere to put those feelings, so I kept pressing play on the VCR. When The Last Dragon premiered on HBO in November 1986, I got caught up in the sappy romance of this corny Kung-Fu story set in a comic book version of 1980s Harlem, a place as foreign to me in my Midwestern cornfield as the moons of Mars.

The glow is either love or malice. It powers how we fight to gain mastery over the elements we value in life. Sho’ Nuff valued respect and power over others, dominated by his brutality. He glowed red with his small but powerful mastery, and it was too strong for Leroy’s punches and kicks when they were powered only by his arrogance and plastic humility. 

True mastery, as eventually revealed on screen, is how we fight for this life we love and for the people who move with us, together through life, as Bob Dylan once sang about in an album of the same name. Our love is imbued by the forces of Natural Law, which bend away from malice, greed, and shameless pursuit of power to dominate. The true glow of mastery over this life comes from the motion of synthesis, not combat, coming together into one, not breaking apart into many. The effect of this synthesis in the field of time and space that separates human beings from one another as we live our interdependent lives is Love, a unifying force of Nature that every human being is born equipped to feel in some capacity. Despite the sobering reality, the mythology of love is that this natural force is more powerful than greed and anger, redirecting human behavior towards synthesis and keeping away from combat violence.

The mastery that Leroy Green seeks is located in the locked heart hidden behind the fortress of Laura Charles’s seventh heaven, which she sings about like a destination of soul-seeking beauty. “You finally found my place,” indeed. Leroy Green’s glow lies behind the smile of a PG-rated video queen. The combat victories in The Last Dragon are secondary in value to winning the lady’s pure heart. 

This film also reveals a subtextual truth of life and love that I will excavate and drag into the light for the young men as thick-headed as I was to watch this movie dozens of times and not get it until I was already old enough to know it. Here is a secret to not only getting the girl but keeping her. For the young men reading, this is a message of dating and partnering that has nothing to do with your dick, your hair, your muscles, your money, or your dance moves.

Make her laugh at you and be as cruel to yourself as necessary to be funny forever at your own expense. Be funny and charming in your self-deprecation. Keep her laughing over decades, and you will build yourself up in her eyes with a wall of insults that change in nature over time as if cooked in a chrysalis. Every time she laughs at you (and eventually with you), those insults will morph into units of shared confidence. After many years of converting your flaws, you may find that all your self-doubt has burned away in the healing fire of her laughter. You may even look down at your hands, astonished that they’ve started to glow. You are now The Last Dragon. What will you do with that power?

The Last Dragon (1985)

Written by Louis Venasta

Directed by Michael Schultz

Shot on 35mm

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Filmed in Manhattan, NYC April, 1984

PAID SUBS ONLY

Read my hand-written first draft below: