YMMV / Fist of Fury

• Funny Moments: The "No Dogs and Chinese Allowed" sign. While racism itself isn't funny, there's no way to make something like this up. But really, it's the absurdly over-the-top way Chen destroys the sign that truly sells the hilarity.
  • Without the context noted on the main page under Sarashi, Chen being able to determine a character is a Japanese spy just by seeing his nipples, complete with a dramatic zoom, is downright hilarious.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Chen is distraught at his master's death, demanding to know how a such a healthy man can die. Barely a year later, many were asking that question when Bruce Lee prematurely died.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Bruce Lee is generally known through Pop-Cultural Osmosis as the prototypical action movie hero who uses spectacular martial arts to beat up Faceless Mooks in a Curbstomp Battle. Although this movie does include him doing this, most people oversee how in this movie he plays an Anti-Hero and a Combat Pragmatist, not to mention the movie's Bolivian Army Ending – all these tropes are generally not associated with Bruce Lee.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Despite the film's less than flattering depiction of the Japanese, Japanese audiences took only mild offense for this, mostly laughing at the stereotypes, and the film itself went to be the 7th highest grossing in Japan of that year. It helped that Lee was marketed over there as more of an American product than a Chinese one (his films were released in Japan in reversed order, with the American-produced Enter the Dragon as the first).
• Moral Event Horizon: When the Japanese school murders the majority of Chen's school.
• Narm: The English dub, particularly when Chen murders one of his teacher's killers with repeated punches to the torso and saying "Why did you kill my teacher? Why, why, why, why, why...?"
• Retroactive Recognition: one of the other students at Chen's school is a young Jackie Chan, who would later star in the official sequel New Fist of Fury in 1976, during Golden Harvest's attempts to groom him into the next Bruce Lee.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • It's quite obvious that nearly all of the film's exterior scenes were shot indoors on a fairly small soundstage, rather than on location, as the buildings look basically like dollhouses. This only becomes more blatant in the scene where Chen is pulling Wu around Shanghai on a rickshaw, because he starts on a set, goes down an obviously real street for a bit, then stops on another set.
  • Chen swinging two Japanese martial artists around with one arm each in an overhead view where it's hilariously obvious that it's really dummies he's swinging around.

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