Karate Kid: Legends Movie Review: Jackie Chan, Ralph Macchio train the next gen in tropey franchise product
Karate Kid: Legends(2 / 5)
A recent TIME magazine article puts an existential question mark on our viewing preferences. The headline reads: Are you watching a movie? Or is it just content? The opinion piece delves into recent releases, trying to decipher the ingredients that go into a movie-movie. Is it about being released on the big or the small screen? Does it have to offer something fresh each time? It’s definitely not about being extravagant and expensive or has to star Viola Davis. The article even steps into philosophical ambiguity: “You know it when you see it.” Then what exactly is the mystical entity called movie-magic made of? Spoiler alert: It’s the mysterious bond the filmmaker forges with the audience. They are the last piece of the puzzle, the chemical X. “No film is real without you.”
Director: Jonathan Entwistle
Cast: Ben Wang, Jackie Cha, Ralph Macchio, Sadie Stanley, Joshua Jackson and Aramis Knight
I found myself unbothered, zoning out while watching Karate Kid: Legends. Coming out fifteen years after the 2010 reboot starring Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan, the film felt like a factory-line product, designed to catch hold of the contemporary young viewer. It’s content with being just a nostalgia piece, desperate to replicate that old-school charm. Everything’s put together but it doesn’t go beyond being the sum of its parts.
As the Karate Kid franchise goes, you take a young guy and you put him in an alien setting. The classic fish out of water screenwriting template. This time, the new kid on the block is Li Fong (Ben Wang), a Chinese national who trains under once drunken master now beaming shifu Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). Li has to move to New York for a rather unimaginative reason (His mother has gotten a job there). The move is as abrupt as a jump cut, one minute we are looking at a Chinese pagoda and the next is a yellow taxi sliding away on the Golden Gate bridge.
For Li, the move to the Big Apple isn’t exactly sour to begin with. He doesn’t face a language barrier since he speaks fluent English. One trip to the local pizza shop and he manages to charm the cute girl Mia (Sadie Stanley) behind the counter. There is only a brief montage to indicate that the new school is overwhelming for him. Till the bad guy shows up, his biggest problem is actually cracking calculus. Yup, there’s an Asian joke in there.
All of this brought back memories from the original The Karate Kid. The 1984 coming-of-age drama wasn’t only about a guy trying to get a girl or training to win a Karate tournament. It was about a less privileged boy trying to make his space in flashy California. The class-divide was peppered everywhere in the film. For his first date, a young Daniel LaRusso is given a lift by his mom in a ramshackle car which, to their embarrassment, they have to push to start when it conks off in front of the girl’s cardigan-sporting affluent parents. The first time Daniel spots his future lady-love sitting by the beach, he inquires one of his friends about her. “She is from the valley,” warns the friend. “What is that supposed to mean?” asks Daniel. “Rich.”
These subtleties are lost on Legends which is only concerned about traversing established tropes and stirring film nostalgia. Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han and Ralph Macchio’s now-older Daniel LaRusso, the OG Karate Kid, join hands to train Li to fight Mia’s ponytailed bully of an ex-boyfriend Conor (Aramis Knight), whose only character motivation seems to be that he is psychotic. He trains at a gym called “Demolition”, which doesn’t leave much to the imagination. I so miss the villainy mystery of the Cobra Kai dojo.
Jackie and Ralph coming together is the USP of the film but their characters are glanced over, and offer no more depth than a cameo appearance. The film often felt like a long training montage with a threadbare of a plot. The only respite was the New York imagery. It wasn’t fresh but it briefly made me relive the big city charm offered by 90s Hollywood rom-coms.
Karate Kid: Legends is just content trying to pass off as a film. It brings all these elements together, the casting, the callbacks, the references, the mid-credit cameo but misses out on the magic ingredient. It doesn’t build a relationship with its viewer and the only way to do that is to be human, vulnerable, real. In his broken English, Mr. Miyagi gave a lesson which wasn’t just about Karate. “If come from inside you, always right one.”