Fight Night: Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris in The Way of the Dragon

The Colosseum fight was a swan song for Lee in the States, and Norris’ debut

By Kenneth Lowe  |  January 17, 2025 | 9:15am
Movies Features Bruce Lee
Fight Night: Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris in The Way of the Dragon
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Conflict is the most basic building block of story, and a fight is the most simple conflict there is: Two people come to blows, and one must triumph over the other. Fight Night is a regular column in which Ken Lowe revisits some of cinema history’s most momentous, spectacular, and inventive fight scenes, from the brutally simple to the devilishly intricate. Check back here for more entries.

Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water in a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend. — Bruce Lee, on the Pierre Berton Show in 1971

When Chuck Norris falls in water, Chuck Norris doesn’t get wet. Water gets Chuck Norris. — Oft-repeated “Chuck Norris joke,” ca. 2004.

I’ve written about how Bruce Lee’s cultural legacy—and specifically the palpable agony people still feel over his premature death more than 50 years ago—looms large over Hollywood and Hong Kong. It is difficult to imagine martial arts movies, television, or even entire broad genres of videogames, without Lee’s influence. In Fight Night, I hope to dig into the movie fight scenes that truly define the art form. In the case of the showstopper at the end of Lee’s directorial debut—and the last of his films released while he was still alive—the fight scene in question goes beyond just cinema.

Part of the reason why is Lee’s opponent—a tall, ruggedly handsome (if profoundly hirsute) fellow competitive martial artist named Carlos Ray “Chuck” Norris. Norris, already an accomplished competitive fighter in Karate, met Lee, then a co-star of The Green Hornet, and the two developed a friendship as they worked and trained together. Lee is a kung fu demigod in Hong Kong cinema history, and the subject of dorm room posters for the past half a century. Norris has largely stepped back from film and TV roles as he’s grown older, but his acting career came after learning Tang Soo Do in the military, opening a martial arts studio, and multiple Karate tournament championships.

Norris is no Lee, and never was, of course. There is a reason he’s the subject of Chuck Norris Facts—a bizarrely resilient class of internet joke from those wild and crazy ’00s: Even as he’s always being completely earnest and even as it’s apparent that he could easily kick you apart, he’s also a wooden actor who has starred in mostly low-to-mid-budget, guilty pleasure sort of stuff. It is therefore plainly funny to come up with exaggerated claims about the guy’s power. Lee, by contrast, is a Platonic ideal whose every pose, every strike, every line reading, seems calculated to flood the viewer’s brain with adrenaline. The guy needs no promoters.

Put Norris in a fight with Lee and you have something very special: Two fighters with the raw strength and instinct of martial arts tournament champions and the technical expertise of Hollywood stuntmen. These are two fellows who know how to move. It’s the recipe for the kind of spectacle that could only feel at home in the Colosseum.

The Film

Lee’s death mere weeks before the release of Enter the Dragon turned him into a star back in his native United States and set off a kind of retroactive frenzy, kicking off the dubious subgenre of “Bruceploitation” martial arts movies. But it also gave Americans a hankering for all martial arts flicks, something the 1972 movie The Way of the Dragon reinforced when it was redubbed and rereleased in America as Return of the Dragon in 1974.

The way to watch the movie, though, is to get your hands on the remastered edition (available most notably in Criterion’s collection of all of Lee’s films). With the original dialogue (and thus preserving, you know, Lee’s actual performance), The Way of the Dragon reads more clearly as Lee’s first shot at embodying his all-inclusive philosophy, with the control that comes from sitting in the director’s chair.

Like all Bruce Lee flicks, it’s a simple enough setup: A Chinese restaurant in Rome is being shaken down by the local mafia, and they send for aid in the form of Tang Lung (Lee). More fascinating than any of the fights are early scenes in which Lee’s character arrives in Rome feeling completely adrift and judged by glaring white people—another manifestation of the theme of oppression and discrimination that runs through all of Lee’s work.

Soon enough, though, we get to the meat of the film: Dumb mooks trying to fight Tang Lung and just getting rinsed. Lee punches them in the face. Lee kicks them into walls. Lee bonks them in the face with nunchaku, which he just happens to have with him in Italy. Lee throws sharpened sticks through their hands when they dare to try to pull guns on him. Lee rinses these idiots so thoroughly and disrespectfully that the mafia goes to the last resort: Calling in a colorful gang of international fighters, including a huge, hairy American to outfight the tiny Chinese guy—Colt, portrayed by Norris. (Though the framing definitely makes it seem as if Norris towers over Lee, the truth is the two were at most just an inch or two apart in height.)

Having rinsed every other one of these boss fights, Tang Lung chases Ho, the treacherous underboss, into the Colosseum. And there, he meets Colt.

The Fight

The framing of the fight here is delicious. Colt stands atop one of the Colosseum’s stands, giving Tang Lung a smirk and a taunting thumbs down, like the caesars of old. The two meet in the shadowy interior of the structure, surrounded by the millennia-old brickwork and watched by a playful kitten. They shed their shirts, flex, and then square off.

In an interview decades later, Norris said Lee was “ahead of his time” when it came to martial arts filmmaking. Kung fu fight choreography can pretty cleanly be separated into pre- and post-Lee periods, with Lee introducing a more intense rhythm. The one-on-one between Lee and Norris here could serve as a proof of concept for that. Norris said Lee assured him that though he’d lose, it would be a “seesaw fight,” and so it is. Colt is the only fighter in the movie who gives Tang Lung any appreciable trouble at all, and the only one for whom Tang Lung seems to have even a modicum of respect.

The first couple of sequences go to Norris—the fight really emphasizes the fact that Norris is a burly guy who is packing a lot of muscle on his frame. Lee takes lumps, falls over, has the makeup artists bruise him up. Finally, though, Lee shakes it off and focuses. You can see him make the conscious choice to adapt, and then he goes into beast mode.

To watch Chuck Norris fight is to watch the athletic equivalent of a master craftsman at work. Even in thoroughly dumb stuff like Walker, Texas Ranger, Norris’ martial arts work oozes competency. It seems like the guy can see math floating through the air as he lines up his roundhouse kicks. In this fight, he is also selling the moment-to-moment emotion: The triumphant exhaustion after he lays Lee out during one beat, or the mounting determination as the fight slips away from him. On the flip side, though, to watch Bruce Lee fight is to watch a prodigy at work: As director and co-choreographer with Norris, Lee and his collaborator have total control over how the fight is presented, and none of the shine has come off it in 50 years.

The remainder of the fight is a blur of fists and feet, and even though it is clear Colt is going to lose, he keeps fighting—at one point, Tang Lung simply shakes his head, begging the guy not to go through with it. But he does, even with one of his arms and one of his legs wrecked by Tang Lung’s assault. Tang Lung breaks him, and the fight is over, but not the ceremony. Trudging back to where they began, Tang Lung picks up Colt’s gi and black belt and drapes them over his defeated foe. It’s a gesture of genuine respect.

There’s just a little bit more kung fu treachery to close out the movie, but it can’t top the showdown here.

The Fallout

The Way of the Dragon positively annihilated the box office upon both of its releases: Handily out-performing Lee’s already record-breaking hits in Hong Kong when it dropped in 1972, and then drawing rowdy crowds when it hit U.S. theaters two years later. It’s also worth it to mention that it continued to cement the popularity of Lee’s filmography (and kung fu flicks in general) within the Black community. One Philadelphia journalist recounted a mostly Black audience that “cheered wildly for Lee, almost as if they were witnessing a prizefight and not viewing a film.” Appeal was universal, though: Roger Ebert, always a man of the people when it came to genre film, remarked on the sheer glee with which Chicago audiences reacted to Lee’s “fists of fury and heels of dynamite and elbows of death.” (He didn’t name the then-unknown Norris in his review, but mentioned that Lee’s opponent “turns up looking like a cross between Steve Reeves and Chuck Connors.”)

I feel kinship with these folks 50 damn years later, because I involuntarily make Bruce Lee noises when I watch Bruce Lee movies because I can’t prevent them from escaping my body. Neither could my Chinese grandfather, at age 80, resist punching at the air in front of him while watching Lee’s fight scenes. The sheer energy of the experience just has to go somewhere, whether it’s coming from us in the audience or from the generations of filmmakers who grew up on The Way of the Dragon and have dedicated their art to committing epic battles to celluloid.

Fight Night returns next month to revisit the fight that changed Star Wars from campy space adventure to mystical epic: Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.

Kenneth Lowe comes right out of a comic book. You can follow him on Bluesky.

 
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