Skinny Tiger, Fatty Dragon - Reception

Reception

Bey Logan pointed out in his review why the film did moderately successful. Firstly, there are certain logic and structure issues which is the negative aspect of the movie. A few examples were the car chasing sequence in which he explains that if the heroes just call the police, the bad guys would be arrested, the film would be over and the scene wouldn't be as funny. The other is the Singapore holiday as he explains, after the Chinese wedding catastrophe, the film should be gaining momentum but instead goes down like a holiday expedition. So overall, the pace of the story is let down for that reason.

For western audiences, the character Baldy played by Karl Maka is described as being way over the top. The reason is his character definition from his previous films, most prominently the Aces Go Places series. So the things he does like the watermelon bowling could come across as very broad. On the other hand, it's really playing to the less sophisticated Asian audiences at the time, that do like this style of broad humour. Compare to Sammo playing Fatty, his character can be overbearing and hard to enjoy without any qualities that makes us want to enjoy his presence in the film.

The mixed and positive aspect is the action sequences with Sammo Hung. After the Bruceploitation, fans of Bruce Lee would disregard any film that tries to copy Bruce Lee's films but never succeeded. However, Sammo Hung's style of action in Logan's opinion is regarded the best because of the way he is able to interpret the Bruce Lee in his own style, while designing the fight sequence that's able to pass off early Bruce Lee references from his movies, in a unique fashion.

Also because of his previous work on Enter the Fat Dragon, he's widely regarded as the best Bruce Lee impersonator, simply because of his early appearance in Enter The Dragon and his action choreography and appearance in Game of Death. Also, because of his bulk appearance and the fact he doesn't look like Bruce Lee (apart from his pudding bowl haircut), the most important element in his action sequences is he sells power. When Sammo fights, it doesn't take more than five hits to knock down a stuntman on camera and that's why his fights works so well. That includes as a rarity, Sammo fighting against the Thai "ladyboys" or tranvestites that haven't been seen in any other films since.