Karate Kid: Legends

by Mike McGranaghan

Karate Kid: Legends is the worst kind of reboot. It has a checklist of things it knows audiences expect from the franchise, and it crosses off those things in robotic fashion, devoid of heart and soul. The 1984 original understood that the power of the story was in the relationship between young Daniel LaRusso and his martial arts mentor Mr. Miyagi. This one thinks it’s in the fighting. Television director Jonathan Entwistle makes his feature debut, treating the material like something that needs to be compacted to leave room for commercials and wrapped up before the top of the hour.

The first half is essentially a rushed remake of the first Karate Kid. Troubled Kung Fu student Li Fong (Ben Wang) is forced to move to a new city by his single mom (Ming-Na Wen). He meets a cute girl, Mia (Sadie Stanley), and gets picked on by a bully named Conor (Aramis Knight) who is obsessed with karate. To win Mia’s heart and his mother’s approval, Li Fong will have to beat Conor in the requisite big championship match. Jackie Chan, reprising his role from the 2010 reboot, plays the boy’s uncle/trainer, Mr. Han. He recruits Daniel (Ralph Macchio) to help prepare for the event.

I seriously have to wonder if writer Rob Lieber ever saw the original Karate Kid movies or if he only read the plot synopses on Wikipedia. His script makes one big mistake after another. Aside from hurrying through the set-up, Legends detours into a weird subplot about Mia’s pizza shop-owning father (Joshua Jackson) owing money to loan sharks and entering a boxing match to win some cash. This boring turn wastes time that could have been spent developing the relationships between the characters or going into Li Fong’s dilemma in more depth. It also prevents Macchio from entering the picture until almost an hour in.

The biggest botch is simply cheating viewers out of what we want, which is to say, a lot of scenes where Mr. Han and Daniel train Li Fong. Entwhistle inexplicably reduces this angle to a series of rapidly edited music montages. Training sequences in the original Karate Kid served two purposes: to grow the bond between Daniel and Miyagi and to help us understand how the unusual techniques (i.e. “Wax on, wax off”) give Daniel the skills he needs to compete. Those qualities are lost here. We want to see Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan together onscreen, mentoring a new Karate Kid. Instead, we get a four-minute music video scored to a Benson Boone song.

By the time Li Fong faces off against Conor, there’s no reason to care. Everything that occurs is completely predictable, and not just because the film literally tells us how Li Fong is going win in advance of the fight. When Daniel took on nemesis Johnny Lawrence in the ’84 movie, the martial arts scenes felt real. The adversaries executed their moves with skill, but each fight seemed like two teenagers going at it. In contrast, fight scenes in Karate Kid: Legends are professionally choreographed and therefore not remotely realistic to the scenario. A couple moves can clearly be identified as having been accomplished through wire work. You lose the stakes as a result.

Ben Wang makes a likeable protagonist. Chan and Macchio, of course, are a potentially fun pair. The actors are not the problem. Karate Kid: Legends is a lazy piece of IP-driven product that never once bothers trying to create the cheer-worthy emotional impact that has allowed John Avildsen’s original to become an enduring classic. On the plus side, this is vindication for Hilary Swank.

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