It's time for me to admit something just in case no one's figured it out yet: I'm of Asian descent. Half-Japanese, specifically. Whenever someone asks me "JavaDevil, why do you watch so much crap?", I simply respond with "I'm just keeping in touch with my ethnic heritage, brother!" I've found that this is an excellent way of masking my geekier tendencies by making critics of my aesthetic taste look like culturally-insensitive gits. This doesn't work, of course, when I'm not watching kung-fu movies or cartoons with giant robots but then again, I haven't been watching too many things without kung-fu or giant robots lately.

So that deductively leads me to this next paragraph, wherein I introduce the B-comedy They Call Me Bruce?. If there ever was a movie that called my personal defense of my own tastes into question, this would be it as this film is both crap and chock full of ethnic stereotypes. But that doesn't mean it can't be entertaining! Especially if you like dumb movies.

Right from the opening, They Call Me Bruce? dates itself by showing the young boy Joon running through the woods to the strains of a disco tune entitled "Oriental Boy". We find that he was making his way to the deathbed of his grandfather (played by Korean comic Johnny Yune). Before grandpa departs, he leaves Bruce with pearls of wisdom like telling him the most important thing in life isn't money it's "Broads!...broads!" In addition, he tells Joon how he met the most beautiful lady in the world in New York City and that he should seek her out someday because she will take care of him. To aid Joon in his search, grandpa gives him a scroll with stuff written on it because Asians never write things down using pen & paper like everyone else.

Fade and cut to the present day (or 1982, when the film was made), where we see a grown-up Joon working for an Italian family as a cook. Just in case we can't tell they're Italian, they're shown eating spaghetti while an accordion plays in the background. Also, they're mobsters. And, in a nice bit of parallelism, the now-adult Joon is played by Johnny Yune, too. His mob employers constantly call him "Bruce" because they say he looks like Bruce Lee. If Johnny Yune looks like Bruce Lee, then I'm a dead ringer for Fan Siu-Wong.

We follow the good-natured but naive Bruce around in his daily life where he seems to be constantly plagued by his inability to live up to his namesake. When he happens upon a robbery in progress, he intervenes, delivering the surely famous line "With my right foot, I can knock out that knife. With my left, I can kick your nose. With this hand, I can poke out your eyes. With this *holds up his other hand*, I can break your neck. Take a good look at my face...I'm an Oriental." Although that never worked for me, it's enough for Bruce to drive the assailant off. Through the use of more bumbling antics, Bruce eventually becomes a local hero when he foils another robbery at the local convenience store.

On the other side of town, we see groups of federal agents busting up some Mafia drugs deals with martial arts and standard issue FBI weapons like shurikens and nunchakus. The mob doesn't care much for this so they peg Bruce, the accidental kung-fu master, to be their new cocaine delivery boy, no doubt citing the long tradition of martial arts greats who moonlighted as drug dealers in their spare time. They just tell the trusting Bruce that he's actually delivering flour for Chinese noodles to New York, pair him up with a vaguely Joe Pesci-like chauffeur named Freddie, and turn the second half of the flick into a road movie.

I don't recall Johnny Yune's old appearances on The Tonight Show or The Love Boat but judging from They Call Me Bruce?, his humor consists mostly of Rodney Dangerfield-style self-deprecating jokes, groanworthy one-liners, and jabs at long out-of-date TV commercials. He confides to a federal agent "Women see me as a sex object. Every time I ask them for sex, they object." That's one of the better ones. He also mentions to someone that his dying grandfather had one wish, "...to live." And then there's that great line "I was once run over by a Toyota. Oh, what a feeling!" The origins of one of the jokes seems to be lost forever in time: Yune takes a drink of some so-called Saki Natural at a bar and a Chinese dragon suddenly bursts into the room through a window and is promptly forgotten about a moment after. Why? I guess it was funny for some reason at the time.

The stars who make cameo appearances in this film is a good indicator of its quality. The cast here includes comedian Bill Kirchenbauer as a crazed hitman who whips a mannequin while quoting Roots, the late, ill-fated Margaux Hemingway as a Mafia assassin, and veteran character actor John Fujioka (who's been in everything from American Ninja to Pearl Harbor) as an irate karate instructor.

In addition to the camera-toting Japanese tourists and Italians who say things like "Whatta you meataballs thinka this is? Monkey business?", there's jive talkin' street thugs and good ol' boy hicks. So there's something for everyone to relate to in this movie. There's even completely laugh-free references to James Bond films, Saturday Night Fever, and Wonder Woman.

They Call Me Bruce? is enjoyable if you like really stupid movies. There must be a lot of people like that since it was followed up by the sequel They Still Call Me Bruce a few years later. Everyone else will sympathize with the street thug who tells Johnny Yune that he can kick Yune's @$$ any day of the week. To those people, Yune's response will likely be "Kick my @$$ any day? I'm busy all week!"


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up to Age 4