bruce Lee: the Master collection

Mediumrare, £34.99 (Blu-ray)

At last we have a done-in-one, six-disc Blu-ray set collecting all of the Little Dragon’s beloved feature films (including Enter the Dragon, excluded from the otherwise comprehensive Hong Kong Legends 30th Anniversary Commemorative Edition of 2003 but licensed from Warner Bros for this release). First up, we get Lee’s rough-and-ready debut in The Big Boss (1971), then the fully-fledged masterpiece that is Fist of Fury (1972). Both films look magnificent in eye-popping new 4K transfers that bring these mash-ups of nationalist sentiment, broad comedy and martial arts to fresh life. Lee’s directorial debut, Way of the Dragon (1972), another new master, is perhaps less of an upgrade from the previous version, but still astonishes with some of the best fight sequences ever committed to celluloid, including the climactic confrontation with Chuck Norris in Rome’s Colosseum. Lee’s final completed work was his international break-out Enter the Dragon (1973), which remains an odd but irresistable mixture of Hong Kong and Western styles with some fantastic set pieces. Finally, we get a 4K master of the unfinished Game of Death (1978), a desperate bit of cinematic grave-robbing that stitched together the small amount of footage Lee had completed with sequences featuring various look (not very) alikes and even newsreel of Lee’s funeral! This set ports over all the extras from the old HKL releases, providing hour upon hour of documentaries, interviews, extra footage and commentaries, and offers options for English, Mandarin and Cantonese audio. An essential celebration of a brilliant and tragically brief career. Ds 9/10