DYNAMO (1980) ** ½

A couple of publicists  discover a taxi driver (Bruce Li) who has an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Lee and sign him to an exclusive contract with the promise of making him a star.  After a crash course in Kung Fu, Bruce goes around the world on a publicity tour where he is jumped by goons in Tokyo, attacked on the ski slopes of Seoul, and accosted by his room service waiter in a hotel room in New York.  Before Li’s big match, some bad guys kidnap his girlfriend and force him to take a dive. 

My enjoyment of Bruceploitation movies mostly rely on their crass willingness to trade in on Bruce Lee’s image.  Dynamo does an OK job in this regard.  Early on, there’s a scene in which some characters get stuck in traffic.  As it turns out, Bruce Lee’s funeral procession is the cause of the traffic jam.  Real footage of the funeral is cut into the scenes of the actors sitting in the car and the results are moderately amusing. 

Another signpost saying you’ve reached Bruceploitation heaven is the hilariously bad dubbing.  There’s plenty of that to go around.  The problem is much of the dubbed dialogue is annoyingly echoey, especially on Li’s karate teacher.  Now, I can put up with dialogue that doesn’t match the actors’ lip movements, but it’s hard to take when it sounds like a Theremin going off every time someone opens their pie hole.  So, in that respect, Dynamo isn’t Bruceploitation heaven; it’s more like Bruceploitation purgatory. 

The Kung Fu action sort of balances everything out.  Li’s teacher (the guy with the annoying bizarro voice) tells his pupil surprise is the best weapon.  Because of that, he encourages Li to attack him whenever he feels like it.  Now, I’m not sure how effective this training method would be in real life, but in this scenario, it leads to several random fights between the two.  Since these duels are more for training purposes, they lack any sort of real stakes.  However, the action is pretty much non-stop, which certainly helps.

The unifying thing that makes Dynamo as good-not-great slice of Bruceploitation flick is Bruce Li’s performance.  Not only does Li kick a lot of ass, he wears Bruce Lee’s yellow jump suit from Game of Death throughout much of the movie (which also adds to the crass cash-in factor).  He also gets what is probably the longest and most gratuitous sex scene of his career.  That doesn’t quite put it over the top, but it adds to the film’s overall WTF quality.