Review: Finishing the Game

Justin Lin's Seventies mockumentary about fake Bruce Lee movies, Finishing the Game, is deceptively simple on the surface. Like other comic films about the earth-tone decade, it often plays as a good-natured spoof of that period's relatively innocent pop culture in the wake of the Big Ideas of the Sixties. But in this case, the story is about casting Lee's final film, Game of Death, after his death in 1973, a subject that inspired Lin and co-writer Josh Diamond to make some more serious statements about racism.

The subject is familiar to anyone who's followed conversations about Asian-Americans in the media, or looked for them there: It's hard for Asians to get any film or TV role in America that isn't there for an "Asian reason," and most of those have involved martial arts or food delivery. But Lin and company make us laugh about it pretty steadily throughout Finishing the Game's 88 minutes.

And we're not just laughing at society or Hollywood. There's a wide variety of humor packed into this brief film: character comedy, relationship comedy, sex comedy, workplace comedy, and old-fashioned slapstick. Last night, Finishing the Game even made an audience at an Asian-American film festival laugh at a Vietnamese refugee's heartfelt story about his family being divided by the war. At other times, Lin delivers his own poignant messages through pure spoof, such as casting Dustin Nguyen of 21 Jump Street as an out-of-luck actor who once gained fame on a short-lived cop show. It's layered filmmaking that keeps you thinking.

Meanwhile, the excellent performances serve the real-world cause of demonstrating the skills of Asian-American actors including Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Leonardo Nam, and Brian Tee. It's a movie about auditions that is itself an audition at another level, and at times imagines an Asian-American movie stardom that is almost unknown in the real world.

The story in Finishing the Game ends abruptly before completing a conventional story arc. Though that may be another "meta" maneuver by the filmmakers, it's disappointing that the movie feels, well, unfinished. But by the time it ends, this "small" film has already delivered more laughs and ideas than most conventional productions ever do.