Granted, by 1971 when this film originally was released, there were already countless films using this proportional position of power and sympathy as a default (and, like, storytelling since ancient times). We want, from frame one, our working-class comrades to win and our elite-class enemies to fail (and what exactly happens in frame one? A big bully smacking around a little kid just trying to sell food for his family, refusing to pay him, wanting instead to hoard wealth and resources while exploiting the labor that made it possible). Wealth and power do not equate a level of spiritual success in The Big Boss we see much more aspiration in the simple-but-gritted life of Cheng. From the gate, director Lo Wei aligns us with the plight of the working class, casting an incredibly charismatic, talented figure as our low-status hero and making our high-status villain as lecherously rendered as possible. That (dis)honor belongs to Han Ying-chieh, whose Hsiao Mi is the head of an ice factory that Lee's poor, humble, and ostensibly non-violent Cheng Chao-an finds a job at just to stay afloat and help his family as best he can. RELATED: Criterion’s Bruce Lee Box Set Is the Definitive Collection for Understanding the Cinema Icon It's quite the feat, making for quite the unique action experience.
The Big Boss promises you the bubblegum of a grindhouse kung fu flick, then gives you the medicine of radicalized political progressivism. But among these signifiers of goofiness lies - pretty gosh-darn explicitly, actually - a pained, incendiary, screaming treatise against the exploitation of the working class by the financially elite. The Big Boss sounds like a deliriously campy, entertaining, and fluffily fun action flick, no? It is all of those things, to be sure, and an essential watch for martial arts fans who haven't dived as deeply into Lee's career as they'd like to.
And Bruce Lee, during one mini-climax, fights a series of flying dogs - canines trained by the villain, canines sold to us via choppy inserts of obviously stuffed paws being flung at one of our greatest screen presences of all time. Martial artists and actors brawl each other in run-and-gun wide shots that sometimes careen into crash zooms, their rubber weapons obviously bending, their sound effects unsynchronized and inaccurate. Funky, oddly mixed prog-rock blasts the eardrums, sometimes cutting off abruptly during a particular smash cut.
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