Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Warrior’ On Netflix, Which Brings Bruce Lee’s Story Of Post Civil War Tong Battles To Life

After The Green Hornet was canceled and before he left to become a superstar in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee wrote a treatment for a show about the Tong Wars in San Francisco in the 1870s. It was found after his untimely death in 1973. Forty-six years later, that treatment was finally made into a series, landing in the hands of action kings Jason Lin and Jonathan Tropper. The result is Warrior, the first two seasons of which originally aired on Cinemax — Season 3 aired on Max — before landing on Netflix in February 2024. Does it honor Lee’s vision?

WARRIOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man looks at a drawing of a girl right before he leaves the hull of the ship he was on. “San Francisco, 1878.”

The Gist: Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) has come from China to San Francisco like many immigrants from his country did in that era; to be cheap labor for wealthy businessmen. But he’s not the average “onion,” the pejorative name for these immigrants; he’s there on a mission. Oh, and he speaks English, the product of having an American grandfather. Oh, and he kicks major ass, as we see when he dispatches three belligerent cops looking for immigration papers. Chao (Hoon Lee), a fixer for Chinatown’s gangs (aka tongs), sees this and takes Ah Sahm to the Hop Wei tong, offering him to its leader, Father Jun (Perry Yung).

While Ah Sahm isn’t your standard tong toady — Father Jun has to admonish him for not bowing to him before he leaves — his abilities impress Jun’s son Young Jun (Jason Tobin), who takes him to a brothel run by Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng). When he asks Ah Toy about the wearabouts of the girl he’s seeking, word gets back to the members of the rival tong. After he dispatches their thugs, he’s branded as a loyal member of Hop Wei.

Meanwhile, a brewing battle is happening between Irish laborers and the Chinese immigrants who take their jobs. After an incident where two Chinese men are killed, Sargent “Big Bill” O’Hara (Kieran Bew) is tasked by Walter Buckley (Langley Kirkwood), deputy to Mayor Samuel Blaks (Christian McKay), to lead a Chinatown squad. It’s an assignment that he takes reluctantly, but one of the people he chooses for the task force, Georgia-born rookie officer Richard Henry Lee (Tom Weston-Jones), who stopped the attack, wants to be there.

Ah Sahm finds the woman he’s looking for, who turns out to be his sister. She came west two years before to escape her violent husband; now she’s Mai Ling (Dianne Doan), wife of rival tong leader Long Zii (Henry Yuk), who sees that their fragile piece with Hop Wei over the opium trade in Chinatown is about to collapse.

Our Take: Warrior, based on writings about the Tong Wars by none other than Bruce Lee, was co-created by Justin Lin (Star Trek Beyond) and Jonathan Tropper (Banshee) (Lee’s daughter Shannon is also an EP), so you expect a lot of action. And the fighting scenes are pretty action-packed; there are three significant scenes in the one-hour first episode, all pretty compact. It’s the rest of the first episode that’s got some issues.

We do get Lin and Tropper’s desire to make the show accessible despite being a period piece; they’re not interested in making Warrior into The Knick or The Alienist, so they resort to more modern language, especially when he’s interpreting the Cantonese the folks in Chinatown use with each other into English. Let’s just say it’s not the Queen’s English, full of f-bombs and a colloquialism for a woman’s body part we’re pretty sure wasn’t prevalent back in the 1870s. But the Chinatown portion of the show more or less plays out like a high-quality martial arts film, so the stylistic choices there can be forgiven a bit.

But we’re not sure why Tropper and Lin have decided to cram in so many storylines into the first episode. Watch the opening credits to Warrior and the cast list just goes on forever, and in the first episode, it seems like they’re serving all of those characters with their own storylines, sacrificing time for the most interesting story, which is the Tong Wars in San Francisco, as well as Ah Sahm’s encounter with his sister. We’ve seen more than enough mustachioed, racist and corrupt cops with Irish brogues to keep us happy, so we’re not sure why the story of O’Hara and his Chinatown squad even exists. It just takes away from the fun that is the Chinatown story, and it feels like the creators are forcibly merging a fun martial arts action series with a serious Peak TV period drama.

Sex and Skin: Lots of nudity: Young Jun is in a threesome at the brothel when the rival tong’s thugs bust into the room; the mayor’s new wife Penelope (Joanna Vanderham) disrobes in front of him, but he seems uninterested; we find out later he has his own sexual proclivities. Ah Sahm sleeps with Ah Toy, who we find out also has a side gig that’s amazingly more interesting than being a madam.

Parting Shot: Ah Sahm, ready to do battle to get his sister back, practices moves in his room.

Sleeper Star: We liked Olivia Cheng as Ah Toy, who is both book and street smart, and as we see at the end of the first episode, quite adept with a sword.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Son, I don’t understand a word you said, but I like the way you said it. You’re hired” O’Hara to Lee after Lee brushes off a fellow officer who threatens him simply because he’s from the South.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s too much going on in Warrior to enjoy it for what it should be, which is a fun and not-that-heavy martial arts action series.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Warrior on MaxGo