New Fist of Fury, starring Jackie Chan, is the sequel to The Chinese Connection, starring Bruce Lee. This was an early role for Chan, too soon for kung fu filmdom to be free of the heavy-handed Bruce Lee formula and too soon for Jackie Chan's charismatic style to have emerged. The movie is an odious, laborious mess. Save for the climactic fights at the end -- which are entertaining enough, though they don't compare to the kind of amazing athletics Chan would perform later -- this is plodding, mind-numbing, and interminable. The ridiculous plot, which involves rival Chinese and Japanese karate schools in Taiwan, is senseless and irrelevant. Such insane amounts of time are spent on developing all the wrong parts of the story, and what is developed is wholly improbable. (In one laughable scene, an eighty-year old jumps across an entire auditorium, fights for about a second, then dies standing up.) Leave this one on the rack.