Very little kung-fu, absolutely no hustle.
Nicholas Hammond’s tenure as the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man in the late seventies was more often a battle against the limitations of a television budget than the machinations of supervillainy, and Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge – the stitched-together finale of the series – doesn’t deviate from that, despite the exotic foreign location filming as the series producers look to make sure they’ve spent the remaining budget before the series is mothballed.
Peter Parker finds himself less a superhero and more Friends Reunited researcher as he works to clear the name of Min Lo Chan (Benson Fong), an old college friend of J Jonah Jameson. The Chinese Minister stands accused of historical treachery involving secrets about Mao Zedong, and his only hope lies in Peter discreetly locating three ex-Marines who can testify to his innocence.
There’s a trademark lack of urgency to Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge, a story that feels like its aware it’s running out the clock and has ninety minutes to fill with roughly forty minutes of actual incident. Much of the Dragon’s Challenge seems to involve the logistical and bureaucratic nightmares of international diplomacy and witness protection, featuring extended sequences of Peter Parker looking perplexed in a variety of patterned shirts while people explain the plot to him in wood-panelled rooms. Potentially global stakes are ostensibly the driver here, but the execution remains firmly tethered to the mundane with much of the plot’s tension derived not from the question of whether Peter can successfully shepherd the final witness, Professor Dent, to Hong Kong before the shadowy industrialist Zeider (Richard Erdman) can silence him to secure a billion-dollar power plant contract.
Rosalind Chao provides a much-needed spark as the minister’s niece, Emily Chan, offering a level of focus and competence that spider-out-of-New York Peter often lacks. She guides him through a Hong Kong that the production treats with a mixture of genuine wonder and back-alley suspicion, eventually becoming one of the few people in this universe to actually discover that the photographer and the wall-crawler are the same person. There’s a quaint charm in seeing our hero perched atop a Victoria Harbour ferry or lurking near the Jumbo Floating Restaurant, even if the suit continues to look like something a particularly dedicated parent might have whipped up on a sewing machine the night before a primary school assembly.
As usual, it’s the action sequences that provide most of the entertainment – for all the wrong reasons. This being the twilight of the series, the production seems to have leaned into a brand of physical comedy that isn’t always intentional. Spider-Man’s combat style remains a bewildering mix of slow-motion tumbling and the “bear hug” school of scuffle, a far cry from the kung-fu throwdown of martial arts versus arachnid agility teased by the poster art. A sequence involving an army of martial artists is intended to be a thrilling clash of combat cultures; instead, it looks like a group of people clumsily practicing tai-chi in too small a space. The stunt work is consistently pragmatic, speedy and economical with Spider-Man running, walking or doing that weird arms-open kind of scuttle thing in preference of wall-crawling or, budget forbid, web swinging.
There’s a notable appearance by a young Ted Danson, appearing as Major Collins, one of the pivotal witnesses Peter must track down but the future star of Cheers has very little screentime to make much of an impact. In that, he is similar to the villain of the piece, Zeider: another entry in the long line of Hammond-era antagonists whose primary weapon is a blandly decorated office at the top of a building and a cadre of clumsy and easily dispatched henchmen. Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge asks the audience to buy in to a high-stakes conspiracy involving the fate of nations that it hasn’t got the capability to show so it relies on telling you about the stakes every so often while distracting you with poor Nicholas Hammond scuttling about in a onesie with tea-strainers over his eyes.
Still, there’s a refreshing lack of cynicism in its approach and it’s endearing how sincerely they try to make everything work despite being constrained to showing us people talking about things rather than showing us people actually doing those things. While it may lack the thrills of its comic book origins, it also struggles to deliver the lower voltage thrills of a detective procedural and ends up just being a weird, slow-moving slog through the bits of Hong Kong the budget could stretch to visiting, the Dragon’s Challenge of the title more one for the audience’s tolerance than Peter Parker’s prowess.
