'Karate Kid: Legends' Is Barely A Movie
The laziest example of IP management disguised as filmmaking I've ever seen.
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At a time when shortened theatrical windows, even for wildly successful films like Sinners, are a source of intense debate among movie-heads, it’s crazy to see a movie like Karate Kid: Legends debut in theaters. Everything about it screams “forgettable streamer,” from concept to story even down to the sets, which often don’t even meet the minimum standards of passability for a Nickelodeon sitcom.
How dire are things when you can’t plausibly evoke “New York Alley?” That’s one of the oldest sets in moviedom! You’d think it’d be possible to do without much money or trouble, but that would assume anyone involved here cared on a level beyond fulfilling the minimum basic requirements, and almost every frame of Karate Kid: Legends positively oozes “let’s just get this thing finished.”
Bad movies these days often wear their corporate mandates on their sleeves, and it doesn’t take genius to figure out what the IP goal was here. The Karate Kid franchise, after three sequels of diminishing returns from 1984 to 1994 (the last starring Hillary Swank, who I had a big crush on at the time), was acquired by Will and Jada Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment, who attempted a reboot in 2010 with Jaden Smith as Daniel-san and Jackie Chan as Nü-Miyagi. That opened a whole can of worms considering Jackie Chan is Chinese and practices kung fu, while karate is Japanese, and press releases at the time proudly touted then-11-year-old Jaden Smith’s black belt in taekwondo, which is Korean. The movie was medium successful at the box office, if not exactly a phenomenon, and for whatever reason its planned sequels never quite panned out.
Then in 2018 came Cobra Kai, a YouTube comedy created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg, starring Billy Zabka and Ralph Macchio as the grown-up versions of the characters from the original Karate Kid. That was such a smash hit that it was soon picked up by Netflix and ran for seven years and 65 episodes, right up until this past February. That would make seem to make the present ripe for a Cobra Kai movie, and render the Karate Kid remake starring Jaden Smith something we could safely leave back in the 20-teens, alongside all the other failed franchise reboots of the era, from Conan the Barbarian starring Jason Momoa to Robocop starring one of our countless Australian Joels*. (*Update: apparently Joel Kinnaman is Swedish, those responsible have been sack tapped).
Only that would ignore the two ironclad tenets of IP-driven movie businessing: (1) No property ever dies, and (2), a combination of properties is better than one. Hence, rather than a Cobra Kai movie involving pretty much anyone who made it a success, we get Karate Kid: Legends, a corpo-quixotic attempt to integrate the timelines of Karate Kid (2010) and Cobra Kai in the form of yet another reboot about a kid starting over at a new school.
A writing professor of mine once said “the root of every story is people and place,” which, if not an infallible mandate, would seem to at least explain why Cobra Kai capitalized on the legacy of the original Karate Kid where so many other attempts did not: it had Ralph Macchio, Billy Zabka, and the San Fernando Valley. Billy Zabka (who I interviewed in 2019) especially turned out to have a knack for comedy (the initial hook), and further along proved capable of depths of emotion that no one else had ever thought to ask him for, allowing the show to grow from one-off joke to genuine phenomenon. What role did this win for Zabka in Karate Kid: Legends, you might rightly wonder? Why, a 30-second cameo right before the closing credits, of course. Even beyond being spawned by cynical corporate triangulation, the level of bag fumbling here is staggering.
This is a movie that attempts a reboot with a new lead (Ben Wang as Li Fong), a team up between Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, and a brand new twist where Li Fong trains an over-the-hill boxer played by Josh Jackson to recapture his past glory long enough to save the local pizzeria. That's probably too much for one movie, especially one that's 94 minutes long. Not that I'm complaining about the shortness. One of the best moments I had in Karate Kid: Legends was looking at my clock and realizing there were only 15 more minutes left.
We open at Jackie Chan's kung fu academy in Beijing, China, one of many sets in Karate Kid: Legends that are wildly unconvincing as the place they're supposed to be. There's a shaggy-haired kid there wearing big headphones on his neck practicing some (not especially impressive-looking) moves on a wing chun dummy. Later we learn that this kid is Li Fong, nephew to Jackie Chan's Mr. Han, the latter of whom is soon arguing with Li's mother (Ming-Na Wen) to let the boy continue his training. Instead, Li’s mother tells him about her new job and immediately whisks him off to New York City. We’re left to assume that this will be a jarring experience, even though both Li and his mother speak flawless American English.
No time to ponder that before Li is a fish so far out of water that he goes into the local pitzerria asking “Hi, do you guys have any stuffed crust?”
Stuffed crust? Marone, kid, does dis look like a friggin food court in New Freakin’ Jersey? retorts the salt-of-the-Earth pizzaiol’, played, hilariously but also kind of charmingly, by Josh Jackson from Dawson's Creek. "…No stuffed crust, got it," responds Li, again, in perfect English. Later we learn he went to an American school in Hong Kong, in the ass-backwards style of exposition a lot of these kinds of movies do.
Once the stuffed crust snafu is out of the way, Li has a follow-up question: “Do you have any toilet paper?"
I suppose if I try very hard I can suspend my disbelief that a kid who was raised in Hong Kong and Beijing, two of the most populous and cosmopolitan cities in the world, wouldn't already know that New York pizzerias don't serve stuffed crust pizza (or how to read a menu). But toilet paper? Is there somewhere in the world where one buys toilet paper from the pizza man? At this point, the pizza man's daughter, Mia (Sadie Stanley) directs Li to the corner "bodega." Seeing his confusion, she notes, “Convenience store. We call them bodegas here. It’s weird."
Ah, yes, convenience stores being called bodegas, the one thing pretty much any non-New Yorker knows about New York besides pizza. If story is about people and place, Karate Kid: Legends comes hard out of the gate seemingly trying to make me lose all conception of either. Who is this kid? Why does he seem to know everything and nothing at the same time?
But the rub is obvious: he's the new kid in town with a crush on a girl (Mia the pizza man’s daughter) and a passion (I guess?) for martial arts. Li clings to Mia as the only person who isn't mean to him and Mia allows it, for reasons unclear. When she tries to buy a part for a walk-in fridge at a hardware store in Chinatown (tool bodegas, we New Yorkers call them), Li talks some Chinese to the clerk and saves her $150. "How about this, I teach you Mandarin and you teach me New York," Li proposes.
"It's a deal, Stuffed Crust," says Mia.
It's a perfectly cromulent start to a potentially fine movie, but instead of going the obvious route, of having Li return to martial arts to train to beat up Mia's ex-boyfriend (Conor, played by Aramis Knight, a mean jock who trains karate at an MMA gym), the film pivots, presumably to some earlier draft of the script that someone forgot to delete all the way. Instead we establish that Mia's dad is in trouble with some loan sharks and in danger of losing the pizza joint.
These swarthy mafioso types come after Josh Jackson one night in an incredibly unconvincing New York alley, where Li Fong, who had never been established as any kind of kung fu prodigy up until this point, hops across trash cans and swings from fire escapes while using his punches and kicks to fight them off. “Wow, dis friggin kid must be friggin Peter Parka or somethin’!” says Josh Jackson, who is adorable as a New York eye-talian in a dog-wearing-sunglasses kind of way.
In a twist on the Karate Kid formula, it’s the kindly older stranger who asks the new kid in town to help train him for a fight. Josh Jackson used to be a boxer, see, but he gave it all up to raise a daughter and make-a some pizza pies and blah blah blah. Now, in order to keep what he has, he’s thinking he should return to boxing, incorporate some chop suey kung fu moves from Li, and earn enough to pay back the loan sharks. Li, who again here I feel I have to reiterate has not really been depicted as any kind of kung fu master up until this point, agrees, and for the next 10 minutes or so Josh Jackson does squats while he slides pies into the ovens and practices the one-inch punches while he kneads the dough. "Everything is kung fu!" Li yells.
Well sure. We've already established that karate is kung fu and taekwondo is kung fu, and so why shouldn't boxing, taking out the trash, and making pizzas be kung fu too? Synergy, baby!
Josh Jackson returns to the ring in another wildly unconvincing set, where he seems to be winning the fight until the loan sharks signal his opponent to start cheating. At which point Josh Jackson gets nearly killed by a series of illegal elbows. You'd think a piece of Josh Jackson's boxing career in addition to the vig on a shitty pizza joint would incentivize them in the other direction, but maybe the mobsters have some kind of developmental toilet paper disability too. One can never tell with this movie.
I'm not even sure how we get from the pizza maiming to Li having to train to fight Conor (in The Five Boroughs Karate Tournament, fought all over the city!) but suffice it to say, this involves Jackie Chan flying over from China, to team up with Daniel LaRusso flying over from Encino, to spend one week teaching Li Fong how to turn his kung fu into karate. If stories are about people and place, Karate Kid: Legends involves a kid who is either a moron or a prodigy trying incorporate San Fernando Karate into Beijing Kung Fu in order to win some kind of glorified breakdance competition in New York City because of pizza. Cowabunga dude!