‘Karate Kid: Legends’ is not the best around
The new film pulls together bits and pieces from four decades of Karate Kid lore, to the point of unintentional hilarity.
The Karate Kid franchise, in which the hero is nearly always a teenager, turned 40 years old last year.
Directed by John G. Avildsen, who also helmed the original Rocky, the 1984 Karate Kid film was a classic underdog story about an undersized teenaged boy named Daniel (Ralph Macchio) who’s aided by mentor Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), through multiple training montages, in winning the All-Valley karate tournament against the evil karate dojo Cobra Kai.
That movie spawned two sequels about the further adventures of Miyagi and Daniel-san, plus 1994’s The Next Karate Kid, which had Miyagi guiding the karate career of a young Hilary Swank.
Pat Morita died in 2005, and the franchise sat doormant until 2010, when a semi-remake arrived, with Jackie Chan in the Miyagi role of Mr. Han, and Will Smith’s son Jaden playing the Daniel-san part. The 2010 film was set in China, and used kung-fu rather than karate as its main martial arts displine, but it still went with The Karate Kid as the title.
The whole thing was revived in 2018, first for YouTube Red and later Netflix, for a spin-off called Cobra Kai, starring Macchio, his old foe Billy Zabka, and a new cast of youngsters. I haven’t seen all of Cobra Kai, which ended up lasting seven years, wrapping up earlier this spring with the only-on-Netflix creation of “Season 6, Part 3.”
But I do know that it did some fascinating and counterintuitive things with the premise, including humanizing the Cobra Kai characters, and at times making Johnny sympathetic and Daniel into an arrogant antagonist.
And now we have the new Karate Kid: Legends, a legacy sequel that awkwardly pulls in bits and pieces of plots from that 40 years of history, and also conjures up important new lore seemingly out of whole cloth.
Did you know that Mr. Miyagi and Mr. Han were friends and had previously unannounced plans to fuse karate and kung fu together? Now you do; when we see a photoshopped picture of the two of them, it was the first of many times in the film that I guffawed audibly.
Karate Kid: Legends isn’t all bad. The young roles are well-cast, I liked the romance subplot, and the final fight is satisfying. The film does a good job using New York, for a franchise that’s mostly been set in Southern California and different parts of Asia.
However, the action and fight scenes, for the most part, are hideously photographed, to the point where the meaning of multiple scenes is lost. Cobra Kai did a lot of interesting things with this universe, and the film probably owes its existance to that show’s popularity, but Legends forgets most of those lessons.
All that said, I was too busy laughing at the plot machinations, coincidences and retconning to much care.
Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio are on the poster; I’m trying to think of the last time Macchio was on a movie poster- it must have been My Cousin Vinny, in 1992. But both are supporting characters here.
The new protagonist is Li (Ben Wang), who grew up in Beijing, as a student of Mr. Han, but is headed to New York when his doctor mother (Ming-Na Wen) gets a new job. It’s heavily implied early on that Li’s older brother died in a tragic karate accident. He didn’t, but if he had, everything involving the mother’s plot would make a lot more sense.
Why does Li speak perfect English with no accent? Back in China, we’re told, he went to an American school.
Li soon befriends and develops a crush on Mia (Sadie Stanley), who works at a pizza place owned by her ex-boxer father Victor (Joshua Jackson). We soon get an inversion of the franchise’s usual relationship, with the teenager training the adult, when Victor decides to make a boxing comeback to pay off some bad people he owes money to.
Why would a boxer benefit from kung-fu training? Why would any boxing promoter offer prize money to a guy pushing 50 who hasn’t fought in years? Why does the film establish that a boxer lost the fight when we saw his opponent punch the ref? The questions continue to mount…
Only in the Karate Kid universe — and also the 2019 indie movie The Art of Self-Defense — is there such a thing as an evil and sadistic karate dojo. If a real dojo did any of the things Cobra Kai does, they would likely be kicked out of every tournament and probably also face racketeering charges. The Cobra Kai series’ best idea was that it humanized the kids who joined Cobra Kai and gave them backstories and motivations.
The new movie throws all that out, and gives us another version of the evil dojo that’s not only violent and diabolical for no apparent reason, but they also do loan-sharking. (Plus, a flashback alerts us to a Chinese version of the same, which goes so far as to murder people with knives if the competitions don’t go their way.)
The film eventually pivots to Li stepping in the competition himself. Aided by his two older mentors – Jackie Chan is now 71, and Ralph Macchio a comparetively spry 63 — he enters the “Five Boroughs Tournament,” which entails a series of fights in nontraditional parts of New York. Including, for some reason, the roof of a building.
The amount of plot machinations that were required to get all of those people in the same room, and explain why they’re there and they know each other, is more of a heavy lift than any of the physical feats.
Jonathan Entwhistle, the director, is best known for directing several different Netflix shows, although not Cobra Kai (he’s also, I gather, no relation to John Entwhistle, the late bass player for The Who.) He shows little aptitude for action, including fight scenes in which the camera shakes so much it’s hard to tell what’s happening. But the film’s troubles are more at the script level, to the point where very little makes much sense.
I get that the Karate Kid movies always had more than their share of plot absurdity. Bill Simmons used to write 20,000-word columns for the old ESPN Page 2 laying out just that, including the third film that followed “a millionaire taking time out of his busy schedule to destroy a teenaged karate champion.” But the new film takes that to another level, and I can’t wait to hear Simmons do a three-hour podcast about it.