Photo of Mike Moh portraying Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood‘s trailer from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood surpassed opening weekend expectations, becoming quite the box-office hit. But Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, was not so happy to see the cocky portrayal of her father in the film, reports TheWrap.
Spoiler warning.
In one scene, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) get into a physical fight started by verbal banter. While Lee wins the first round, Booth takes it back in the second.
“It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theater and listen to people laugh at my father,” Shannon Lee told TheWrap. “Here, he’s the one with all the puffery and he’s the one challenging Brad Pitt. Which is not how he was.”
She explained that her father was not one to jump into fights despite the many challenges he received.
“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”
And while she thinks Mike Moh did a good job portraying Bruce Lee, she thinks Moh “was directed to be a caricature.”
“He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air,” she said. “And not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.”
Shannon Lee runs the Bruce Lee Foundation, which has awarded over $80,000 in financial assistance to students and families in the US so far. She said her efforts in raising consciousness about Bruce Lee were “flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.”
Matthew Polly, author of Bruce Lee: A Life, noted that Lee was often sidelined in favor of White actors to play Asian roles until Hong Kong martial arts movies became popularized in the US.
In the movie, Lee boasts that he could turn Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) into a “cripple.” But Polly said that “Bruce revered Cassius Clay (Ali); he never trash talked him in real life.”
“Bruce Lee was often a cocky, strutting, braggart, but Tarantino took those traits and exaggerated them to the point of a SNL caricature,” Polly told TheWrap.
“I suspect the reason Tarantino felt the need to take Bruce down a notch is because Lee’s introduction of Eastern martial arts to Hollywood fight choreography represented a threat to the livelihood of old Western stuntmen like Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who were often incapable of adapting to a new era, and the film’s nostalgic, revisionist sympathies are entirely with the cowboys.”
According to his widow Linda Lee Cadwell, Bruce Lee had a concept for a western series called The Warrior, but Hollywood turned it into the series Kung Fu, reports Nerd Reactor. It was not until this year that Jonathan Tropper and Justin Lin brought Bruce Lee’s concept to TV in the show Warrior, which has been renewed for a second season. The series is centered on a martial arts prodigy who immigrates from China to San Francisco and is set during the Tong Wars in the late 1800s.
TheWrap and USA TODAY reached out to Tarantino for comment.
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