If you didn’t think you had enough of The Karate Kid after six incredible seasons of Cobra Kai, think again! Sony is bringing the iconic franchise back to the big screen in Karate Kid: Legends, a legacy sequel that wants to capitalize on the success of both iterations of the film & television series (the universe of the 1984 film created by John G. Avildsen and Robert Mark Kamen, alongside Harald Zwart’s 2010 reboot). Honestly? It makes perfect sense, as a way to bridge the two aspects that people love about both versions of the movie: Karate and Kung Fu. Plus, who doesn’t want to see Jackie Chan interact with Ralph Macchio, as differing martial arts philosophies butt heads in an entertaining way?
Spoiler alert: you’re going to have to wait a long time before you see them on screen together, as Karate Kid: Legends, which is set three years after the events of Cobra Kai, focuses on something else entirely in an attempt to give a fresh new twist to the world of The Karate Kid. Its protagonist, Li Fong (Ben Wang), is already an experienced martial artist and has been training in Mr. Han’s (Jackie Chan) Kung Fu school since he was a child. We don’t need to go through the “underdog” story this time around because he has a solid foundation and integrates Kung Fu into his daily life.
Already, this proposition sounds tantalizing, even when director Jonathan Entwistle and writer Rob Lieber tread the same story from other Karate Kid pieces of media, without much refreshment in the basic conceit. Li has to move away from Beijing to Montrea – I mean, New York – with his mother (Ming-Na Wen), who has accepted a position at a local hospital, leaving his past life behind and attempting to start anew, with fighting and martial arts in his rearview mirror.
Arriving in the city, he meets Mia Lipani (Sadie Stanley), and instantly falls in love with her. But she has a past aggressive relationship with an elite martial arts champion named Connor Day (Aramis Knight), who still hasn’t received from their breakup and begins to torment Li in his new school. Gee, where have I seen that before?
It’s extremely unapologetic in how it rips off from The Karate Kid, from the evil Cobra Kai-like dojo and its ruthless sensei, to the mentor/mentee relationship Li has with Mr. Han, and eventually Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), the burgeoning romance between Li and Mia, and the impossible finishing move that Li, of course, pulls off gracefully when he needs it the most. Where the movie differs from other Karate Kid pieces of media is, again, Li being very good at Kung Fu from the get-go, and even utilizing his skills to train Mia’s father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), a boxer who is currently having trouble with the mob, as he borrowed money from them to open his pizza shop and still hasn’t paid them back…
Yes, this is what the movie’s about, and takes a relatively good chunk of the story before it clumsily leads to Mr. Han arriving in New York to help Li in defeating Connor at the 5 Boroughs Tournament, where he travels to California to enlist the help of Daniel LaRusso. Macchio doesn’t even properly appear until an hour in, where there are twenty-six minutes left of the movie before the credits begin to roll, and there’s supposed to be a symbiotic relationship occurring between the student, sensei, and shifu, as they prepare for one of their toughest-ever challenges. Or is it really? It’s hard to say…
A Karate Kid movie without much character growth
What sets Avildsen’s trilogy apart (The Karate Kid Part III is a great movie. Argue with a wall) from what Entwistle treats in Legends is how each character was given their time in the spotlight. In the original Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi was a complex, layered figure who still hadn’t recovered from the death of his wife and was extremely reluctant even to train LaRusso for the All-Valley Tournament, even when it may be the only way out of their predicament.
In Harald Zwart’s 2010 reboot of The Karate Kid, these emotional textures were kept for Mr. Han, in a moving sequence where the shifu learns of his purpose in life after Jaden Smith’s Dre Parker helps him pick up the pieces and allows him to live again, even if the tragic death of his family will always be a part of him.
None of this is found in this latest iteration, regardless of whether Jackie Chan gives another impassioned performance as Mr. Han. In fact, his past mentorship isn’t even mentioned at all, as if the character never existed in the first place. And his connection with Li is barely glossed over, from brief flashbacks that recount the student’s past trauma after the death of his brother, which he still hasn’t recovered from, but will absolutely overcome when the movie reaches its final fight.
Yet, that seems to be the least of the movie’s problems, which attempts to clumsily link Miyagi’s family tree with that of Mr. Han, through a repurposed sequence from The Karate Kid Part II at the top of the film. Whether or not you’ll buy into this connection is entirely up to you, but the dynamic Chan has with Macchio’s LaRusso, as they attempt to train Li with two distinct martial arts styles, is one of the movie’s biggest strengths.
Yet, they’re barely in the movie! And when they eventually unite forces in training Li, the movie zips through the section that everyone has been patiently waiting for by having the entire back half edited like a TikTok montage, replete with horrendous needle-drops (Benson Boone, most notably) and a refusal to properly develop the core relationship that should theoretically be the heart of Karate Kid: Legends.
Instead of actively fleshing out the characters, the movie wants to arrive as quickly as possible to the final fight, with little to no investment in the characters, even Daniel, who, after six seasons of Cobra Kai and an amazingly developed arc, doesn’t have a clue what he’s exactly doing here.
You can tell the film was severely changed in the editing room. Scenes where Li sits with either Mr. Han or Daniel, in which they impart their knowledge to him about not only Karate and Kung Fu, but what their life experiences have taught them, don’t even last a minute. It wants to rush through everything because it subconsciously knows the audience understands where it’s heading, yet has no patience to do what Avildsen (and, by extension, showrunners Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg did in Cobra Kai) to intriguingly give a mentor/mentee relationship that will make Li’s telegraphed win not only feel earned, but emotionally impactful.
However, the relationship with Li’s mother and their eventual reconciliation are so haphazardly stitched together that one wonders if there are many scenes from the film that would’ve added some dramatic heft to their respective story that were deleted to keep this 94-minute runtime tight.
Ben Wang steals the show
And it’s a shame the film is Frankensteined this way because through it all, Ben Wang is an absolute powerhouse. Ever since he broke onto the scene with an excellent supporting turn in Jingyi Shao’s Chang Can Dunk, I knew he would be destined for greatness. It’s utterly unsurprising to me that he can eclipse both Jackie Chan and Macchio during scenes where they all share the screen.
More impressively, he can also hold his own during well-mounted and choreographed fight scenes, which not only tip the hat to the legacy of the Karate Kid franchise in both film and television but also martial arts cinema as a whole. One fight move seems stolen straight out of Shaw Brothers territory or, more recently, Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, and it’s great to see Entwistle at least embrace the combined powers of both Karate and Kung Fu effectively as Miyagi-Do and Han’s styles coalesce.
It’s electrifying, even if the plot itself, which leads to Mr. Han traveling to New York to help Li, is complete nonsense, more so than The Karate Kid Part III and The Next Karate Kid. The former had a billionaire “hooked up on cocaine,” clearing his entire schedule for revenge, while the latter had a school security patrol training its students to kill people. Legends‘ plot seems nonsensical because its connective threads aren’t deepened, and the overall emotional attachment to the protagonist’s plight barely exists, especially when we know how this film will ultimately conclude.
Some of the narrative choices made here are baffling, though not as far-fetched as anything presented in Cobra Kai. However, what sets that series apart from this film is, again, how it developed everything, and left no stone unturned in satisfyingly paying off every single narrative arc (though it did have the benefit of six seasons of television), while Legends is barely interested in giving us a fully formed protagonist and an entertainingly synchronized relationship with two grandmasters of martial arts.
Thank heavens Ben Wang seems like a generational talent because he is truly holding this entire movie on his shoulders and makes this installment semi-watchable.
And for those who have seen Cobra Kai in its entirety, Entwistle didn’t forget you and makes what is possibly the best nod for the series anyone can capture, without necessarily forcing the audience to sit through 65 episodes of television if they didn’t want to. Although, the only ones who’ll feel some connection to that specific moment are the hardcore fans who have always stuck through on the franchise’s side. Some may end up feeling disappointed that this bizarre legacy sequel doesn’t live up to the quality of writing and character development they’ve expected from The Karate Kid for the past seven years…
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