Enter the Offspring

The stream of gangster pictures continues--this time, yakuza style.

Director Mark Lester is currently shooting “Showdown in Little Tokyo,” on location in L.A., with Brandon Lee--son of the late martial-arts star Bruce Lee--making his starring debut in an American film.

Lee and Dolph Lundgren play cops--one Caucasian, the other Japanese-American--who team up to close down a drug operation that Japanese gangsters have established in Southern California.

Can Lester avoid the criticism that greeted “Black Rain” (1989) for its alleged racial stereotyping?

He points out that the movie was inspired by a Los Angeles Times article about yakuza involved in the hard-drug trade here. Interviews with a detective on the Los Angeles Police Department’s Asian Task Force “verified” that yakuza are busy in L.A. with illegal drug and gambling operations, Lester said.

“We’re showing good Japanese as well as Japanese criminals,” Lester says, “just as there are good and bad in every race.”

Lee, who is half-Chinese, was born in the United States, raised in Hong Kong and now makes his home here. He says he has not given “more than a passing thought” to a possible Asian backlash.

“I don’t know much about the Asian community because I’m not really a part of it,” he says. “I don’t even consider myself part of the American community, honestly speaking.”

If his portrayal helps the Asian community gain “a better standing in America, that’s great,” he adds. “But it’s not why I became an actor. . . .”

Lee, 26, has appeared previously in two low-budget foreign features, as well as a couple of American TV roles. He’s recently signed multi-picture contracts with 20th Century Fox and Carolco Pictures, and begins shooting “Moving Target” for Fox in May.

As for working in his late father’s shadow: “I think that any person who goes to see a martial-arts film compares whoever’s in it to my father, because he’s the standard. Are they going to compare me? Sure. Even more than somebody else? Sure.

“Do I worry about it? No.”