Finishing the Game

Bruce Lee has died, leaving 12 minutes of footage towards his masterpiece, The Game of Death. The studio with the rights to the footage seeks to finish the film using a body double.

Being a mockumentary, this film will draw the inevitable comparisons to Christopher Guest's work. And it will inevitably fall short, because as similar to each other as Guest's films are (seen one, seen them all, etc), they generally have excellent writing, pace, and timing.

Finishing the Game is too short for what it intends to accomplish. Characters are introduced with a long backstory, only to be dropped within minutes of the first casting call. The three casting calls are rushed through with no real concern for how well they went or how the characters are effected.

The potential for self-referencing and in-jokes is huge here, and a roomful of egotistical martial artists leaves plenty of room for conflict, but the script does very little with the goldmine it is sitting on. Expect quick, kneejerk laughs and a rather unsatisfying, if appropriate, ending.

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Finishing the Game (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [**___]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [***__]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: Fists of Fuhrer! Or the Ron Jeremy scene. Tough call.

Memories I want to erase: The white guy's clench-fu makes Cartman's ro-sham-bo look positively pleasant.

What I would do different: The film didn't take its time to set up any good jokes, or even to introduce more than a semblance of conflict between the characters. Probably an extra half hour and some good writing would fix things.