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Like his father, he has parlayed stylish, cat-quick kung-fu moves into a movie career. In his first big starring role in the new Rapid Fire, he's an art student caught between American and Thai drug gangs. And while his previous roles - including Dolph Lundgren's sidekick in Showdown in Little Tokyo and a ninja assassin in TV's Kung Fu: The Movie - have also been action-oriented, the lithe, 28-year-old actor says he's not wedded to the genre. Being Bruce Lee's son ``helps you get your foot in the door a little bit sooner than you might have otherwise. But you can't live trying to live up to somebody else's opinion of what your father was like,'' he says. Rapid Fire pays tribute to his father after Lee's peeved character, Jake Lo, slams around a double-crossing FBI agent. Detective Mace Ryan (Powers Boothe) warns Lo to control his ``fists of fury,'' a reference to one of Bruce Lee's films. In his next movie, The Crow, Lee plays a vengeful returned-from-the-dead rock musician, who gets his kicks by spouting lines from Edgar Allan Poe. ``You have to have the determination to go after other (types of) roles,'' he says. ``Maybe it will mean you won't have the big motor home or whatever, but I didn't get into this for the motor home.'' Instead, the theater graduate from Boston's Emerson College says he hopes his films can support the Los Angeles stage troupe Legal Aliens. The actor, who is single, has worked in New York and did a one-man play based on the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Lee brings a touch of theater to Rapid Fire's action scenes, choreographed with childhood friend Jeff Imada. ``The fight scenes are not my idea of what a real fight scene would look like,'' Lee says. ``You have to walk this fine line between theatricality and reality. If you go too far over the top, I think you lose people.'' He should know, since he began training ``from the time I could walk.'' He joined his San Francisco-born father on the sets of his movies, filmed mostly in Hong Kong. To avoid the furor surrounding his father's mysterious death there in 1973 (reportedly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 32), his mother moved Lee and his sister Shannon to Los Angeles - where he still studies with his father's senior student, Dan Inosanto. At age 20, he returned to Hong Kong to film the Cantonese-language Legacy of Rage. Lee says moving to the U.S. didn't help the family escape films exploiting Bruce Lee's legend - starring imitators called Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lei. ``When I was in elementary school, kids would come up and say `I saw your dad in a movie last night.' It angered me because to people who didn't know any better they probably thought that was my dad. Some of those films purported to be biographical so I would see these films with some little kid playing me.``At their best, I suppose a film like that is a form of flattery. At their worst, it was just a really shallow attempt for somebody to make a buck.'' CUTLINE:BRANDON LEE: He chose to follow dad Bruce Lee's cinematic footsteps, but he's not going to limit himself to fighting roles.
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