Remember the terrible 2010 remake of Eighties teen classic The Karate Kid, the awful one where suddenly karate was kung-fu, the one that was less a continuation of the franchise and more another chapter in Will Smith’s ongoing vanity project to make his son Jaden a movie star?
Well, it’s not a remake anymore. Through a clumsy and ethically questionable narration by the presumably CG-conjured ghost of the late Pat Morita, now it’s part of the main series. Now it serves as a prequel to Karate Kid: Legends, the sixth film in the series and a tepid mishmash of all the prior films that somehow is worse than any of them.
The basics of every Karate Kid plot is the fish-out-of-water teenager who finds inner strength through martial arts. This time around, it’s Li Fong (Wang), a Beijing kid relocated to New York by his mother (Wen, reduced to a scolding exposition machine) to get him away from the kung-fu taught by his grandfather, Han (Chan, returning from the remake – see, I told you it all lined up). Li’s only friend in the Big Apple is Mia (Stanley) who works in a neighborhood pizza shop – because it’s New York. That’s the level of scripting we’re at.
Excelling at the physical aspects of the part, Wang (American Born Chinese) manages to find a little more to Li than just a sulky teen. Yet the script gives him so little to work with that it’s almost impossible to find coherence in his character. For example, he can take out three armed adults in a street fight, but gets blindsided and coldcocked by local bully Connor (Knight)? Is he good in a fight or not? Does it matter?
No, not really. Karate Kid: Legends is a soulless slog between references, retcons, and retreads of the earlier films that implausibly brings back as many characters as possible. Hilary Swank may have had better things to do, but original karate kid Ralph Macchio returns as Daniel-san to team up with Han to train Li for the inevitable karate tournament. In fact, there’s two tournaments, both with training montages, because Li ends up prepping Mia’s retired boxer father, Victor (Jackson), for his return to the ring. All credit to Jackson, who between this and the equally nonsensical Doctor Odyssey shows a knack for making the ridiculous somewhat plausible, and he deserves a medal and a weight belt for carrying so much of the first hour of the film on his back. Everyone else just speedwalks through line readings while Dana E. Glauberman edits every scene to visual incoherence until the final scene – good versus evil on the only NYC skyscraper rooftop with no crosswinds.
Yet beyond the filmmaking ugliness, Karate Kid: Legends seems like an incredibly calculating and callous film when it comes to its own legacy. The geopolitics of the franchise have never exactly had a sterling reputation for cultural sensitivity: After all, on the page Mr. Miyagi was a thinly sketched Mystical Oriental, and it was only in Morita’s sensitive performance as a WWII veteran who lost his family in the internment camps that it crawled out of the era’s mound of ninjasploitation. But the presence of Chan, who has spent the last couple of decades as a propagandist for Beijing, is bad enough. That this film somehow reduces the Hollywoodized version of Japanese karate to Chinese king-fu’s little brother feels like an even bigger betrayal of the original than digitally simulating Norita’s voice for that revisionist opening. It all feels like an overt and craven effort to secure distribution in the notoriously restrictive but lucrative Chinese market.
But what feels even more calculating is that this “sixth verse, same as the first five” mess is just a way to keep squeezing money from the IP. At least the spinoff show, Cobra Kai, had a little ingenuity: Karate Kid: Legends is just the same and more, setting up extra unnecessary sequels. It’s hard not to imagine the long game is all about keying up sociopathic Connor and his Demolition gym for their own redemptive streaming show 20 years from now, just as Johnny got to apologize for sweeping the leg across six seasons. Kids may come out of Karate Kid: Legends crane-kicking in excitement from the handful of fights, and older fans can relish the nostalgia, but for everyone else it’s wax on, nod off.
This article appears in May 30 • 2025.