Enter The Dragon at 50: 11 movies influenced by Bruce Lee's classic

At its heart, Enter The Dragon was a spy movie designed to recall, if not rival, James Bond, then the premier Hollywood action franchise. A year after Dragon’s release, tipped its hat to the climax of Enter The Dragon with its own version where the famed MI6 agent (Roger Moore) and the villainous Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) face-off in a room of mirrors that intentionally “mirrors” Lee’s battle with Han (Shih Kien) at the end of Enter The Dragon.

Bruce Lee looms over the 1985 martial arts comedy , where he’s revered as a godlike figure by Leroy Green (Taimak), a Black teen from New York who aspires to have the power of Bruce Lee. Literally. The movie revolves around Lee’s power in “The Last Dragon,” which one can obtain with the right training. Besides a scene where Enter The Dragon is screened in a dingy theater, The Last Dragon lovingly celebrates the art and culture shared between the Black and Asian communities which Enter The Dragon fostered.

, Jean Claude Van Damme’s best and most famous movie, is about an American ninja competing in an underground martial arts tournament in Hong Kong. The movie wears its Enter The Dragon influences so obviously on its sleeve that it even cast Bolo Yeung to play the bad guy. In Enter The Dragon Yeung played Han’s main henchman, who was also named Bolo.

Centered around a mystical tournament that decides the fate of the multiverse, began life as a controversial arcade hit that horrified parents and Democratic senators alike before evolving into a multimedia franchise. There’s a lot of Enter The Dragon in the Mortal Kombat arcade game, from the look and feel of its Shaolin arenas to the shared likeness between protagonist Liu Kang and Bruce Lee. In 1995, Mortal Kombat was adapted to film by Paul W.S. Anderson. It more or less followed Enter The Dragon’s plot, with ninja magic thrown in. Robin Shou stars as Liu Kang, a Shaolin monk (like Lee) who participates in the Mortal Kombat tournament—on an island!—overseen by the sorcerer Shang Tsung, played by Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa in a performance that recalls Han.

Brett Ratner’s hit sequel to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker’s buddy cop comedy carries whiffs of Enter The Dragon, from its immersive opening montage of Hong Kong to the majestic score from Lalo Schifrin, who also scored Enter The Dragon. And let’s not forget an aging-like-milk gag where like he’s in a “buffet line,” in an homage to .

While the duology is marinated in Quentin Tarantino’s grindhouse influences, there’s almost an overabundance of Bruce Lee iconography throughout the two pictures. Between Uma Thurman’s motorcycle fit that echoes Lee’s jumpsuit from (his last unfinished movie) to more than one explicit nod to The Green Hornet, it’s clear Tarantino loves the man even if he made Brad Pitt powerbomb him onto a car in .  by the YouTube channel Nerdstalgic, Dave Baker argues that the Kill Bill movies are an elaborate metaphor for revenge by Tarantino on behalf of Bruce Lee; its antagonist Bill is played by David Carradine, who famously starred in the wildly popular TV series . While Bruce Lee’s actual connections to that show are fiercely debated today, the fact remains that Carradine played a part that would have fit Bruce Lee like a tailored suit. Kill Bill exists as a testament to Lee’s influence over even cinema’s most ardent apostles.

For a brief but unforgettable moment in Enter The Dragon, Bruce Lee steamrolls some goons using just two sticks, one in each hand. Audiences didn’t know it in 1973, but they were witness to the beauty and brutality of Filipino Martial Arts, also called arnis or escrima. Practiced by native Filipinos for centuries, Lee was introduced to the discipline by his student, Dan Inosanto. Lee showed it off in Enter The Dragon, and Hollywood has been in love with it ever since. So many action movies of the last 40 years have choreographed fight scenes around FMA, including and definitely not limited to: (1985), (2002), (2006), (2010), (2014), (2015), (2021), and the Bourne films (2002-2016). But few movies used FMA like Zack Snyder’s , its fight scenes designed by Inosanto’s student Damon Caro. Caro said he relied on FMA to approximate the hand-to-hand combat of the ancient Greeks due to the lack of surviving scholarship around their actual martial styles.

The beginning of Enter The Dragon has a pre-fame Sammo Hung getting twisted into submission by Lee, a portent to the rise of mixed martial arts and the UFC. In fact, Enter The Dragon is often hailed as  In 2011’s , Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton played brothers whose beef spills into the cages of an MMA tournament. While most MMA movies feel like second-rate boxing dramas, Warrior stands out for its visceral and realistic depiction of the sport and its emotionally charged story, which elevate the film above a rudimentary macho drama. In many ways Warrior is the movie Bruce Lee would have wanted to make, being a martial arts showcase that isn’t just a spectacle.

It’s not simply that the longtime director of the John Wick films, Chad Stahelski, was a student of Dan Inosanto, himself a former student of Bruce Lee’s. It’s the John Wick series’ specific flavor of choreography and its approach to capturing that on camera, with long cuts, clear framing, and no superhuman feats beyond what the actors can physically pull off—all a testament to the influence of Enter The Dragon. contains yet another homage to the scene from Enter The Dragon featuring two combatants in a room with multiple mirrors.

that the climax of his 2018 movie —with its big room of mirrors, yet again—was inspired by Enter The Dragon. When one of the biggest movie star’s in the world references Enter The Dragon, you know its reach is undeniable.