Karate Kid is a franchise that almost feels like the kid’s version of Rocky, which features Karate and Kung Fu instead of boxing. It is known for the familiar template we see in sports-based dramas where the hero is in a situation where he has to prove himself through fighting, and we have our usual drill of training montages, initial failures, and other stuff, making it a combination of motivation and entertainment. The latest addition to the franchise, which sort of combines the world of the Ralph Macchio movies and that one Jacky Chan movie, has no major aspiration to concentrate on the life-lesson aspect of the franchise. With the focus majorly shifting to the repartee, Karate Kid: Legends is an easy watch, but it is also one of the most forgettable entries to the franchise.
So the story is set in the present day and Mr. Han’s great-nephew Li Fong is our central character. Li who trained under Han in Beijing is forced to leave the country and his Kung Fu training when his mother decides to shift to New York for a better life. What we see in Karate Kid: Legends is the events that unfold in the life of Li, when he reaches New York.
In the early New York bits of the movie, we get to see Li becoming closer to a girl named Mia and her father Victor. The humor and flow in the give and take between these characters is pretty smooth and it was so smooth that I ended up thinking they should have made a different romantic comedy film using the same cast. The story beats are not at all surprising. The classic naive hero getting thrashed by the bully trope is getting repeated again and I think to soften this possible criticism the movie even refers to Li as Chinese Peter Parker. Then you have the much-hyped collaboration of Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso happening and the repeated usage of One Tree – Two Branches kind of makes the movie look like a spoon-fed version that is almost targetting kids.
Ben Wang as the friendly neighborhood Chinese guy was fun to watch. And like I already mentioned, the conversation bits in the earlier portions of the movie have him flowing pretty smoothly almost making me want to see him in a romantic comedy. There is one fight sequence in the film featuring him that tries to emulate the fun charm of the vintage Jackie Chan fights. Both Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio has rarely anything to do here rather than being on the right and left of the hero in coaching snippets. Joshua Jackson as Victor and Sadie Stanley as Mia are the other two important performers here and they sort of maintained the cool factor.
Directed by Jonathan Entwistle and written by Rob Lieber, there is no intention to reinvent the franchise and move it in a different direction. It almost felt like Lieber had this romantic comedy idea of an immigrant young dude falling in love with someone from New York and when he got hired to write Karate Kid: Legends, he sort of tweaked that story to accommodate the formulaic elements in a Karate Kid story. The way this movie skims through the final tournament and the preparation for it is so lazy that you can clearly see the producers were only trying to cash in on the popularity of the franchise.
The light-hearted beats of the movie and the usual story arc of the hero being an underdog and beating the reigning champion might well make this movie a passable entertainer for someone like a young kid who might be watching this movie as their first Karate Kid film. However, the rest who have seen better versions of the same template will have fewer takeaways from this creatively lazy formulaic film.
