KARATE KID: LEGENDS REVIEW

“Gets so predictable and obvious by the end, you’re left wondering how things could have gone so wrong.”

Honestly, I was never really a fan of the ‘80s The Karate Kid or its sequels, so I never felt inclined to watch the very popular Cobra Kai series that people seem to be loving. On the other hand, I absolutely adored the 2010 remake starring Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith, so I’m happy that the movie wasn’t completely thrown out, abandoned, or erased while trying to revisit the earlier concept and characters.

In fact, Karate Kid: Legends wisely opens with an explanation of the connection between Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han (from the 2010 movie) and Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi from the earlier movies. We’re then introduced to Ben Wang’s Li Fong and his doctor mother, played by Ming-na Wen, who doesn’t approve of her young son training with Han to fight after losing her elder son Bo after a martial arts competition. In fact, Li’s mother has just taken a job in New York, so her son has to adjust to this new lifestyle, soon meeting and becoming friends with Mia (Sadie Stanley) and her father Victor (Joshua Jackson), who runs a pizza shop. Essentially, where the 2010 movie was about a New York kid moving to China to train under Jackie Chan, this movie is now about one of Han’s Beijing students moving to New York, and eventually running into similar problems himself. Got it.

You can do a lot to sway this critic’s favor by casting the brilliant Ming-na Wen in your movie, essentially as a Tiger Mom, while setting much of the film in my own Chinatown neighborhood is also going to go far in currying my favor. But that will only go so far, and it isn’t enough to save a movie that should have been so much better. The previous Karate Kid certainly benefited from being set in its glamorous international location, rather than in my own backyard.

Karate Kid Legends is directed by Jonathan Entwhistle, a director of shorts, music videos, and television, making his theatrical feature debut, and you can tell. A better director would have been able to make more out of the weak screenplay by Rob Lieber that takes the formula that’s pervaded the earlier movies and muddles it up with all sorts of unnecessary crap.

To be fair, Ben Wang grew on me as the film goes along, and I enjoyed his friendship with Mia, but the movie takes the most basic, cookie-cutter plot where you always clearly know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are with no real surprises. The latter is represented by karate champion Connor, played by Aramis Knight, who also used to date Mia and doesn’t like that she’s spending time with Li, while the guy who runs his dojo, Tim Rozon’s O’Shea, is also a loan shark who has been threatening Victor for money he owes. This leads to a half hour in which Victor, a former boxer, convinces Li to train him using his kung fu techniques, for no apparent reason other than for him to compete to pay off O’Shea. It’s not something you would have seen in any trailer, and that’s because the movie is not called “Karate Dad,” yet the movie spends a good amount of time on that pointless tangent. There’s also Wyatt Oleff who brings the comic relief as Li’s calculus tutor, but again, why is that character even necessary?

If you’ve seen that omnipresent trailer, you might expect the movie to spend way more time with Han training Li, which should be the point of the movie, but that literally is just the last half hour of the movie after Victor’s plan fails. It’s also nearly an hour before Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso enters the picture, to add the sort of fan service that seems mandatory for these “legacy sequels,” and leading to the obligatory training montage that The Karate Kid had already ripped off from the Rocky movies. Essentially, Li will face Connor in the 5 Boroughs Karate Tournament for reasons that are never quite clear, and Han somehow convinces Li’s mother it’s okay, essentially negating the whole reason she doesn’t want her younger son to fight. It’s like she suddenly loses all the backbone she displayed up until that point.

The film’s musical choices also show signs of a director who doesn’t have enough knowledge or experience to deliver, going for ludicrous choices like LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum” (a great song!) for an alley-way street fight that just doesn’t work. In case you need to be reminded that LaRosa resides across the country in California, they use 2Pac’s “California Love,” not once but twice, to set up those scenes. It’s hard to determine whether that’s out of laziness or incompetence.

Karate Kid: Legends has moments that are both cute and charming, but it also gets so predictable and obvious by the end, you’re left wondering how things could have gone so wrong. While the 2010 movie did a good job reinventing the premise from the ‘80s movies, this one comes across more like the fairly recent Superfly remake, where it’s hard to recommend this either to fans of the original movies or anyone else, for that matter.

Rating: 6/10

Karate Kid: Legends opens on May 30.