Director – Jonathan Entwhistle – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 94m
*****
Latest franchise entry plays by all the rules that you would expect, yet somehow manages to completely break the mould and come up with something fresh and original – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, May 28th
All a Karate Kid movie has to do is put a boy in peril from a bully or similar, then have him schooled in martial arts by a trainer to discover his inner strength and ultimately overcome the bully in combat. This is facilitated by a fight competition at the end, in which the two come face to face with one another. While the original The Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen, 1984) clearly struck enough of a chord to spawn more films, some entries, such as The Karate Kid Part III (John G. Avildsen, 1989), have felt worn, tired and clichéd.
That changed with the genuinely brilliant idea of introducing Hong Kong’s clown prince of kung fu Jackie Chan as the trainer in the two decades later remake The Karate Kid (Harold Zwart, 2010), which breathed new life into the big screen franchise (there have also been live action and animated spin-offs made for television).
The new film Karate Kid: Legends brings Chan back in his role as Mr. Han, now running a kung fu school in Okinawa, Japan in 1986, and swiftly introduces his star pupil Li Fong (Ben Wang from Mean Girls, Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr., 2024; American Born Chinese, TV series, 2023), a teenager who trains obsessively even as he is tormented by the memory of his failure to stop thugs killing his older brother from whom he had learned the rudiments of kung fu.
Mr. Han does his best to avoid Li’s mother The Doctor (Ming-Na Wen from The Mandalorian, TV series, 2019-20; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001; Mulan, Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, 1998; The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang, 1993), who believes that violence inevitably leads to violence, and that any and all practice of martial arts is a form of such violence. Her surviving son and his trainer might see it differently, but when you see Li training furiously, as if somehow trying to get his brother back, you start to wonder.
This somewhat precarious state of affairs is upended by the Doctor’s sudden announcement (in English!) within minutes of the film starting that she and her son are moving to New York, where she is to take up a new job in a hospital. Why is she telling him this in English?, asks Mr. Han. “New country, new language,” she replies.
The film briskly moves to the Big Apple and Jackie Chan vanishes from the narrative, apart from appearing for the odd international phone call with the boy, leaving the audience to wonder if they have been conned into thinking he had a star role rather than a mere cameo. However, Wang’s Li turns out to be more than capable of carrying the film on his own.
The Doctor is less than thrilled when her son goes out exploring with intent to find the nearest pizza parlour, and gets insulted by asshole pizza store owner Victor Lipani (Joshua Jackson from Dawson’s Creek, TV series, 1998-2003; Apt Pupil, Bryan Singer, 1998; The Mighty Ducks, Stephen Herek, 1992) until his daughter Mia (Sadie Stanley from Kim Possible, Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein, 2019) steps in and helpfully takes his order.
After his first day at the new school the next day, he runs into her again, and they walk and bond, although she warns him off the local karate school where her former boyfriend Conor (Aramis Knight from Into the Badlands, TV series, 2015-19) – a mistake she wishes she hadn’t made – trains. As far as Conor is concerned, she is still his girlfriend, and he emphasises the fact by punching Li hard in the face unprovoked when, cronies in tow, he runs into the two of them together on a subway train.
Victor, in his shop, helps out Li by making up his eye to get rid of much of the visible signs of the bruise, and the pair start to bond. Nothing gets past The Doctor, though, as she pulls the teabag off his closed, made-up eye when she catches him asleep in the flat soon after.
One night, Li is outside trying to fix Mia’s broken down motor scooter when thugs jump him, and Victor gets involved. After the incident, Victor talks about his debt problem with ruthless moneylenders; the only way out he can see would be to revive his former skills as a champion boxer, win an upcoming competition with its attendant prize money and pay off the debt. To achieve this, he enlists Li as trainer. Li initially refuses, believing it would betray his promise to his mother that he would not practice martial arts.
Meanwhile, The Doctor has partnered Li with personal tutor Alan (Wyatt Oleff from It, Andy Muschietti, 2017) to help him cram for upcoming school exams.
In parallel to this, Li decides he needs to beat Conor in the upcoming Five Boroughs Tournament. Mr. Han turns up in New York to facilitate his training – and relieve those Jackie Chan fans who feared they’d been short-changed – as does the now grown-up Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio who played the character as a child in the first three Karate Kid films), the former schooling the boy in kung fu, the latter in karate, while Alan comes into his own by providing a rooftop training space (where he keeps pigeons) as the contest with Conor looms…
The film thus does everything it needs to, twice over. It also functions as an effective late Jackie Chan movie – lots of hand-to-hand training in the second half, no death defying stunts whatsoever (but then, Jackie is getting old) yet with plenty of opportunity for Chan to demonstrate his considerable skill as a knockabout, physical comedian with great comic timing.
On top of that, it’s perfectly serviceable as a light teenage romance in which the emphasis is largely on friendship rather than physical intimacy (one sequence has them about to kiss only to be interrupted when her dad appears unexpectedly, and that’s about as physical as it gets), which makes for strangely refreshing viewing in our usually sex-soaked movie culture.
There are a number of terrific fight scenes, as you might expect given the involvement of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, with whom the star has consistently put his movie stunts together over the last few decades. Yet where some past Jackie Chan vehicles have consisted of extraordinary stunt sequences strung together via the flimsiest of plots, this movie’s fight scenes are very much in service of the story the film wants to tell, rather than the other way round.
In addition, some showstopping if altogether very brief, full on, action-packed 2D animated sequences add another, welcome layer to the overall whole.
In short, this latest Karate Kid instalment commendably achieves everything it needs to, but it generally aims higher than that and achieves far more. A much better movie altogether than you might imagine, it earns a far more favourable review than I expected to write going in. Perhaps it’s best not to raise your expectations bar too high beforehand, because that was how I saw it, and you’ll enjoy it more that way.
Karate Kid: Legends is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, May 28th.
Trailer: