On the first day of its release, Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood raked in a whopping $16.9M and went on to debut to $40.3M, making it the director’s best opening weekend to date. Clearly, it’s a box office success, but not everyone is loving it.
In an interview with The Wrap, Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee said it was “disheartening” to see her father depicted as “an arrogant a**hole who was full of hot air” in Tarantino’s film.
Spoiler alert: in the film, Brad Pitt’s character Cliff Booth and Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh) agree to a three-round fight on the set of The Green Hornet.
“I can understand all the reasoning behind what is portrayed in the movie,” Lee’s daughter told The Wrap. “I understand that the two characters are antiheroes and this is sort of like a rage fantasy of what would happen…and they’re portraying a period of time that clearly had a lot of racism and exclusion.”
“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bada** who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”
Lee said that she felt like her dad came across as “arrogant,” and “not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.”
“It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theatre and listen to people who laughed at my father,” she said. “What I’m interested in is raising the consciousness of who Bruce Lee was as a human being and how he lived his life,” she added. “All of that was flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.”
Matthew Polly, the author of Bruce Lee: A Life, also took issue with Tarantino’s depiction of the late, great actor and martial artist. “Given how sympathetic Tarantino’s portrayal of Steve McQueen, Jay Sebring, and Sharon Tate is, I’m surprised he didn’t afford the same courtesy to Lee, the only non-white character in the film,” he told The Wrap.
Credit: Amazon
No word from Tarantino on the criticism, but it sounds like Lee’s Twitter fans agree that he could have been portrayed in a more realistic light.