YMMV / The Last Dragon

• Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack! It's produced by Motown, so what do you expect?
  • Special props to “The Glow,” which begins when Sho’nuff disappears at the beginning of the Final Battle.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Just before the climactic free-for-all at 7th Heaven, a music video starts playing out of nowhere, featuring a performer who looks a lot like Angela but has a much better singing voice. Eddie has no idea where the video came from, Rock refers to the singer as "Charlene," and then the scene ends just as abruptly as it began.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sho'nuff, sure enough. He's ludicrously over-the-top as a villain, dresses like a campy football player/samurai, and always looks and sounds like he just smelled something terrible. Naturally, he's awesome.
• Fountain of Memes: Pretty much everything about Sho'nuff has become memetic, but particularly "WHO IS... THE MASTAH?!"
  • "SHO'NUFF! THE SHOGUN OF HARLEM!!"
• Ham and Cheese: Julius Carry (Sho'Nuff) and Christopher Murney (Arkadian) both take their performances up to eleven. Murney was so deliberately over-the-top that Faith Prince (Angela) struggled to avoid Corpsing in her scenes with him.
• Narm Charm:
  • Some find Taimak's acting wooden. And that's perfect for playing the socially awkward Leroy, on top of giving it a nice chop-socky feel.
  • The whole movie. It has trouble succeeding as a Blaxploitation movie, a musical, a comedy or a Kung-Fu movie, but the mere fact that it even tried to mix all those genres together makes it very entertaining on a campy level. It's helped by most of the actors realizing exactly what kind of camp film they're in, and leaning into it.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • William H. Macy is the guy begging Laura to play Angela's video at the beginning.
  • Chazz Palminteri is Hood #2.
  • Leeroy's young student was played by Ernie Reyes Jr.. Reyes was best known as Keno in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, but had a lengthy career as a stuntman and martial arts instructor at his father's school in California. Reyes and his father are now considered American martial arts legends.
• Unintentional Period Piece: You could not get more eighties if you tried.

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