Less than Legendary: A Review of "Karate Kid: Legends"
The new "Karate Kid" succumbs to the worse habits of modern day legacy sequels, despite a promising first half.
Is it possible to recommend just one half of a movie?
For the first hour of the now sixth entry in the Karate Kid saga, it was a pleasant surprise to find myself genuinely engaged by its well-balanced mix of human drama, martial arts action, and creative twist on the series’ formula.
The second half, on the other hand, was everything I feared it would be – no-risk storytelling with a heavy reliance on stale 80’s nostalgia and familiar characters. It’s this latter half, which throws away all the emotional investment of that first part, that makes it hard to recommend Legends outside of kids or long-time fans.
The set up will be familiar to anyone who has seen a Karate Kid movie: Starting in Beijing, we’re introduced to Li (played by relative newcomer, Ben Wang), a teen kung-fu prodigy, training at his uncle’s school of martial arts. When his older brother and fellow student is tragically killed by a rival fighter, Li’s mother decides to start fresh, and moves them to New York City. Fearing Li will meet the same fate, she makes him promise to give up fighting permanently.
That promise becomes a lot harder to keep when shortly after arriving he befriends his classmate Mia (Sadie Stanley), the daughter of a local pizza shop owner, Victor (Joshua Jackson), who is also a former boxer deep in debt to a dangerous loan shark. After Li helps him fight off an attack by some gangsters, Victor asks Li to teach him some of his techniques to help train for an upcoming boxing match to earn the money he needs to save the shop and life. Li is hesitant at first but eventually agrees. He won’t be the one fighting after all.
It's not the most original set up, but director Johnathan Entwistle and screenwriter Rob Lieber make the wise choice to play it all sincerely, which is exactly the tone you want from this kind of movie. What really helped hooked me was how it uses the familiar set up and twists it in an interesting way. Legends takes Karate Kid modeus operendi of a teen learning to stand up for themself by learning martial arts by an older fighter and reverses it. This time, the teen, Li, teaches the older fighter, Victor. While this is happening, Mia helps him acclimate to New York, romance starts to bloom, and all while Li must work through the guilt he feels over his brother’s death.
The movie’s best asset is the talented cast, particularly the younger actors, and especially newcomer, Ben Wang. Mark my words, Wang is a future movie star in the making. He has great chemistry with Sadie Stanley during their romantic scenes, and he sells both the physical acting and the emotional ones with an equal amount of charm and charisma.
But then Jackie Chan shows up.
Let’s backtrack for a moment. Remember that uncle I mentioned? That’s Mr. Han, played by Chan and reprising his role from the 2010 remake that starred Jaden Smith. Before we’re even introduced to Li there’s a prologue using repurposed footage from The Karate Kid Part II, which retcons explains how both Mr. Han and Mr. Miyagi – mentor from the first movie, played by the irreplaceable academy award winning Pat Morita – were not only best friends, but Han’s ancestors taught Miyagi’s grandfather kung-fu, which he then infused with karate to make the Miyagi karate style.
What all that contrived backstory essentially does is give the movie an excuse to have Mr. Han recruit Miyagi’s student, Daniel LaRusso, the hero from the 1985 original, and now a sensei himself, from the first movie to come to New York and help Han co-teach Li the art of Miyagi Karate, so he can win NYC’s Five Boroughs Karate Tournament and save the rec center Victor and Mia’s pizza shop.
Okay, you may be asking yourself, “Wait, I thought this was about kung-fu and boxing, where did this karate tournament come from?” Believe me, I was asking myself the same thing while watching it. The whole boxing and paying off the loan shark plot line is over and wrapped up once Mr. Han comes to New York. From then on, it’s all about Li winning a karate tournament, which is basically the same plot as the other movies, except now it’s a literal street fighting tournament, with matches taking place across the city, with cheering crowds that look like they were taken straight from the background of a Fatal Fury stage. If you had told me at this point that the setting had moved to Southtown, I may have believed you.
It's not just the tournament itself that resembles a video game. Once Li starts training with Han and LaRusso, the entire movie starts to play out like a late 80’s/early 90’s fighting game. The film starts to employ graffiti-esque text that conveniently counts us down to the tournament and tells us who is fighting and where. The pacing, too changes, quick editing that cuts scenes off seemingly seconds before they’re supposed to naturally end give the impression that the movie is playing at 1.5x speed.
Hold on, wasn’t his mom being anti-martial arts kind of thing? Not to worry, a quick two-minute scene of them hugging will resolve that. Now, back to Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan exchanging quips whilst subjecting Li to some classic Karate Kid style menial-labor-as-martial arts-training montages and musical needle drops.
I’ll admit, there are few moments of campy fun to be had, and the fights themselves are nicely choreographed, but as I was watching the climactic fight set on top of a New York skyscraper, it occurred to me that this was no longer that small-scale, coming-of-age tale we had begun with, and I really missed that. Perhaps I would have been more invested had Li’s main rival, Connor, Mia’s ex and karate obsessed sociopath, had been more of a character rather than just a cartoon bully. The series’ other usually had at least a little nuance to them. Johnny Lawrence from the first movie, also a bully and rival for the main love interests, was a compelling enough character that decades later they made him the start of Cobra Kai. I doubt Connor will get the same chance.
It's because of this juxtaposition that I can only recommend this movie up to a point. Perhaps the filmmakers lost confidence in their ability to engage audiences with just a well-told story of a kid coming to New York and overcoming grief. Maybe the success of Cobra Kai convinced Sony/Columbia that they couldn’t make a successful Karate Kid movie without legacy characters. Whatever the reason, Karate Kid: Legends lesser than its title would imply. Kids and pre-teens not as familiar with the tropes might get something out it. Like I said at the start, I can recommend the first hour, after that, you might be better off watching one of the originals or playing Street Fighter 6.
