YMMV / Enter the Dragon

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did Lee go into his fight with O'Hara with the intent to eventually kill him, as it may look, or was he content with beating and humiliating him until O'Hara brought out the broken bottles? After kicking O'Hara into the audience Lee turns around, bows to Han, and looks quite ready to make his exit until O'Hara comes at him with the bottles. That might also explain Lee's momentarily anguished face after killing him, as if he was realizing he had just gone too far in the heat of the moment.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The duel between Lee and O'Hara is probably meant to be cathartic for Lee's character, this being the presumable reason why it is even more of a Curbstomp Battle than his usual fights, with Lee beating, counterbeating and generally kicking him around literally at every movement.
• Awesome Music: The film is scored by Lalo Schifrin. It's even more awesome when we learn in some documentaries that Bruce Lee trained to the Mission: Impossible theme song.
• Common Knowledge: No, Bruce Lee and Bolo Yeung do not actually face off at any point in the film. It's easy to understand where that misconception would arise since a showdown between the two would've been one for the ages.
• Complete Monster: Han is a martial artist turned crime lord who kidnaps women off the streets of Hong Kong to hook them on drugs to make "high demands". Han would even conduct experiments on teenage girls to test his drugs, which has warped some of their minds as a result. Han starts a martial arts tournament to recruit new fighters for his drug operation, having his guards executed by his henchman Bolo in public solely for incompetence. Han later has a participant of his tournament, Williams, beaten and tortured to death for information and threatens his friend Roper to join him unless he also suffers the same fate. Han later forces Roper to fight hero Lee to the death, only to try to then have his men try and kill Roper and Lee for defeating his henchman instead. Han was the template for countless amoral and brutal martial arts villains in Hong Kong and American cinema and other media.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Williams was so popular it pretty much single-handedly catapulted Jim Kelly to martial arts stardom for the rest of his career. One of the main criticisms of the film is in fact his early death.
  • Ditto for Bolo, who became something of a Memetic Badass in several Eastern European countries after Enter the Dragon first appeared on television in the early 1990s.
• Fight Scene Failure: The goof is more in the philosophy than the choreography, but it's notable that at the beginning of the film, Lee's slaps his student because he took his eyes off Lee while bowing to him - yet when Lee fights O'Hara, Lee himself does exactly that! It's likely that the scene with the apprentice was shot after the fight and they left it that way hoping nobody would notice the detail.
• Genre Turning Point: This is the film that brought the martial arts craze to America.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "O'Hara's treachery has disgraced us all."
  • "You have offended my family... and you have offended the Shaolin Temple."
  • "Don't think. Feeeeel."
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Early in the film, we learn that Han gets off on coaxing his mistresses into destroying themselves with heroin. Then we see some of the process first-hand. It's not pretty.
  • Han himself deliberately invokes the trope: He puts his cat in a guillotine and asks if Roper is willing to kill it. Roper refuses.
  • When he visits his relative's graves, Lee himself asks for forgiveness, as he is certain that his revenge will reach a Moral Event Horizon. The look on Lee's face after killing O'Hara suggests that he is afflicted that, either consciously or in the spur of the moment, he has just crossed the line.
• Narm: This face◊. And the "WAAAAAaaaaaaaaa..." yell he makes during it (at 28 seconds). Of course, being Bruce Lee, it might qualify as Narm Charm.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The stoned girls are completely unaware that Williams is being murdered in front of them, even when his head smashes a lens of one's sunglasses.
  • You can actually hear Williams' bones crunching from every impact as he's being beaten to death.
  • One of the drugged girls in the heroin lab begs for help. She comes right out of no where and scares Bruce Lee of all people. The girl in front is too drugged to even register what is happening, and doesn't even appear to be breathing.
• Once Original, Now Common: At this point, you're probably familiar with multiple works of fiction about martial arts tournaments being held on islands out in the middle of nowhere so in that respect, Enter The Dragon might feel like a Cliché Storm... except that this was actually the first work of fiction about a martial artist hero having to fight his way through an island tournament to face the Big Bad in a spectacular battle. The only reason viewers at the time might have feel familiar with the setting is the film's atmosphere echoing 007's novel You Only Live Twice, whose film adaptation has been acknowledged as a likely inspiration for this movie.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: In the UK, this film is at least as well known for kicking off a ban of nunchucks on the screen under controversial BBFC director James Ferman as it is for its merits as a martial arts picture. Copycat crimes inspired by the film are said to have caused Ferman to take a hatchet to any film or television program that so much as showed nunchucks for his entire career at the board.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Jackie Chan has one of his first roles as a random Mook. During the cavern fight he grabs Lee in a bear hug, only for Lee to quickly reverse the hold, kick another guy, and break his neck. He was also hit in the face for real during the famous nunchuck scene, which he says is still one of the most painful injuries he's ever suffered in his career.
  • Lee fights and submits Sammo Hung in the opening scene.
  • Roper later goes to face Freddy Krueger not once but twice.
  • As mentioned on the front page, Angela Mao Ying aka "Lady Whirlwind" found appreciation among non-Chinese audiences as the tragic sister of Lee, Su Lin.
• Signature Scene: The mirror scene is probably one of the most famous scenes in martial arts movies, and has been referenced and parodied numerous times.
• Special Effects Failure: In one scene where Lee kicks Han across the face, Han has clearly been replaced by a dummy.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Han's daughters are skilled enough fighters to catch Roper off-guard... yet we never again see them in action after that brief scene, not even in the climax when everyone ELSE on Han's island is throwing down.
• Too Cool to Live: Williams.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The leisure suits, turtle necks, the funky music, Williams' afro and manner of speech along with mentioning that the Vietnam War was only a few years ago, all point to this movie being in The '70s. Also, this movie is mostly responsible for kickstarting the kung-fu craze in the US during this time.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Considering that this was long before CGI could be used to cover it up, the fact that the climatic fight is completely surrounded by mirrors and you never once see the camera crew in them is just stunning.

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