Karate Kid Legends is here! Did we need this movie, of course not! However, sometimes we get really fun movies that are completely unnecessary. This is certainly one of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the movie even though I have quite a few criticisms. I enjoyed the movie and it’s worth watching especially if you’re a Karate Kid fan. And this movie did what I thought was the impossible… it actually made the Jackie Chan Karate Kid movie better despite the fact that it has nothing to do with karate but kung fu. I know, I’m still just as confused as you are. But this movie also proves that Jackie Chan’s character of Sensei Han is great and should be part of The Karate Kid universe. And despite all the faults of this movie, the best part really is Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio teaming up like it’s a “karate buddy cop film.” The chemistry is there. The one-liners are great. And more importantly, their action scenes are good.
Now the basic story of Karate Kid Legends is pretty much recreating the original Karate Kid movie and Jackie Chan’s Karate Kid movie. The story centers on a new student in a new city, he likes a girl, he gets bullied, and then enters the big bad karate tournament within the film where he will eventually take on his nemesis. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, isn’t this story played out? I agree, but that doesn’t stop the movie from being fun because here are the best parts of the film. You get great characters that you can easily connect to. You get a lot of great martial arts scenes. And you get a great dynamic between Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio. Despite the same old tire plot, there’s enough that makes it fun to watch especially with all of the great action scenes. But it’s not a great movie. It doesn’t have the same emotional connection that you get with the first Karate Kid movie or even part 2. I will say that it’s a better movie than the Jackie Chan / Jaden Smith version which literally is a carbon copy of The Karate Kid. It’s almost as if they did a shot-for-shot remake of the original Karate Kid much like Spielberg did with West Side Story! But this film has a lot more going for it because at least the main protagonist is a lot more likable. Ben Wang is a great actor and always plays characters that are easy to root for. Plus he’s a lot more talented as a martial arts actor than anybody that we have seen before throughout the Karate Kid universe. But it’s almost like this should have been The Karate Kid movie we got with Jackie Chan instead of the one with Jaden Smith. I liken it to a Windows operating system where they have to make a good operating system to fix the bad one you made previously. But there are definitely likable characters and some interesting subplots with the main girl and her father running a pizza place. Ming-Na Wen does a great job of playing the mother, but let’s face it she’s good at anything she does even if she’s not given a whole lot to work with. And like all karate kid movies, the best part of the movie always comes down to the karate tournament… this film is no exception. It may not make sense in the traditional sense of past karate tournaments in the same universe. It may seem like a tournament that likens itself to street racing in the Fast and the Furious movies, but it doesn’t matter because it gives us a lot of good action and that’s why you probably want to see this movie. But this storyline is played out and that’s one of the film’s biggest downfalls.
As I said there’s a lot to like about the movie, but there’s nothing original about the movie and that’s what really keeps it from being great. I’ll admit that my nostalgia for the first two Karate Kid movies blinds me a little bit to the fact that they’re not overly great movies, but what does make them better than what there are is the emotional connections between the characters. You get a lot of sadness and regret with your characters as they overcome their past. Karate Legends deals with that to a point but also glosses over everything to run towards the action. I just don’t feel the same way about the character’s past that I do with the first two Karate Kid movies. It’s almost as if the filmmakers wanted to make a campy teenage karate movie with a lot of great action in one-liners but skip all the emotion that comes with the baggage surrounding the characters. Yes, you get flashbacks of the tragedy that happened to the main character’s brother… but there’s still more grief that’s never dealt with. Perhaps there’s a deleted seen or two that addresses these things and it’s disappointing if they didn’t make it into the film, but Karate Kid movies have never shied away from the tragic circumstances of its characters.
The Cobra Kai show constantly dealt with that and made you sympathize even with the villains that you love to hate. But my biggest problem with the movie… the villains. At least we sympathized and found something likable when it came to Johnny in the original Karate Kid movie. All his friends weren’t straight-up bullies who committed violence for the sake of violence. Johnny’s big beef with Daniel was literally over a girl and having to deal with kind of a crazy Sensei but you at least sympathized with him because he was a war hero. When it comes to the primary antagonist, Connor, there’s no reason to care. He’s just a bully that has no redeeming value and his sensei is just a two-bit thug who has no honor. While it’s easy to make that argument with John Kreese, at least in the movie we start to understand his motivations and of course, they explored a lot more in the Cobra Kai series. But there’s nothing in this movie that makes you connect with the main Karate Kid villain and his sensei. They’re generic, they’re predictable and downright boring! The only redeeming quality of the character Connor is when he at least bows to his opponent when he recognizes that his opponent is either better or at least just as good as he is. There’s one moment of respect and maybe some regret. But the film gives us no reason to sympathize with the villains and the only way we care about villains in any story is when we find some redeeming value or can sympathize with them. The villains could have been written so much better, I would have at least appreciated it if there was a Cobra Kai-like karate gang as in the first movie, but there isn’t. There’s no point leaving giving the villain’s names. You could have called them generic assholes and that would have been perfectly fine.
What really makes me mad about this film is despite the fact that they’re essentially recreating the original Karate Kid movie, the filmmakers missed all of the emotional connections with the characters that made the original films great. It seems that the only thing they wanted Karate Kid Legends to be is an action/comedy movie without the emotional weight that centers the characters in the story except for a few flashback scenes that show the big brother tragically dying. However, it’s not enough Even the scene with Han and Daniel talking about Mr. Miyagi seemed very short and to the point without any real emotion. So did they just want to make an action movie and not the same kind of drama as with the previous films? But like I said, it’s a fun movie and it makes the Jackie Chan Karate Kid movie a lot better. This movie feels more like his do-over. It is a nice way to connect both universes that were already previously set up in Karate Kid Part 2 when Mr. Miyagi ended up in China and came back and how the two families are connected. It’s a nice way to do it, but there’s so much more to the story that gets left out and maybe this is where they should have just had a series. Hopefully, The Karate Kid universe grows and we get to revisit some of these characters with the mixture of Kung Fu and Karate.
There’s definitely a lot of potential there and if nothing else a way to expand these stories without having to rely on legacy characters that prop up the story…something that was pointed out by critic Jimmy Alford in our conversation about the film. I agree. It’s a good way to transition to the new generation, something to think about as they expand the Cobra Kai universe. Karate Kid Legends had a lot of potential to be a more emotional movie than it is, but it is a fun action movie with a lot of great one-liners so yes I think it’s definitely worth seeing in the theater, but for trying to recreate the original storyline, it falls short of what made the Karate Kid and The Karate Kid Part 2 and in a sense the third movie great. And it can certainly take some lessons from the Cobra Kai series where the redemption stories are fantastic. I hope that we get to see more of these characters and expand on their journeys because if this is the only time that we get to see them then I feel a little short-changed. Maybe there be a sequel or two that leads the main character into a bigger tournament kind of like what Cobra Kai did with the Seika Taikai tournament. However, for me despite as many problems as I have with this film, I still had fun with it and there is one scene that makes up for everything… this is a spoiler!!! Having a cameo from William Zapka’s Johnny at the end of the movie was fantastic and has a great nod to the success of the Cobra Kai series. Maybe this film serves as a great introduction to a larger universe of connecting all of these characters… Maybe that’s the best thing that can come from the film!
