Most legacy sequels frustrate in their imprisonment to the original films. The character cameos, repeated iconic lines, and mystery linkages between the past and the present all make for an easy money grab, as time shows again and again, but they also explicitly bog the films down. The best versions of the cycle of reboots and legacy sequels look like Creed, with an ambitious filmmaker trojan-horsing artistic merit into a myopic Rocky series. Karate Kid: Legends, the fifth film in the franchise, irks, then, because while it’s certainly not a great film, it disrupts this otherwise reliable pattern. All irony noted, it’s a film that’s at its best in all the recycled junk it peddles and at its worst in all other endeavors.
Legends finds its ceiling when the franchise’s former stars are on the screen. Ralph Macchio returns as Daniel LaRusso and Jackie Chan makes his second appearance as Mr. Han, and the screenplay begs for the viewer not to think for more than five seconds about their reasons for returning here. But the two elder statesmen are also this latest entry’s best performers. Director Jonathan Entwistle’s first feature also functions pretty serviceably as a remake, with Ben Wang in the role of Li Fong, this iteration’s mandatory geographic transplant who enters a martial arts tournament and fights a bully. But then the film begins to try new things and stray too far from the formula, and the results are dire. At this point, it’s clear that much like a child trick-or-treating in a small neighborhood and returning again and again to the same houses, the Karate Kid franchise will keep coming back until it no longer gets the goods it asks for — which is unfortunate, because now more than ever, the last thing we need is more formulaic blockbusters clogging cinema’s arteries.
But back to the film. Li Fong moves from Beijing to New York City when his mom gets a new job. Leaving behind his uncle and Kung Fu shifu Mr. Han in Beijing, he adjusts to life in “the big city” impossibly quickly. (As an aside, it’s annoying and a little bizarre how multiple characters refer to the move from Beijing to NYC as if the former isn’t also one of the world’s biggest cities. He isn’t moving from the countryside!) On his first night in his new city, he forms a crush on local high school pizzaiolo Mia Lipani (Sadie Stanley), whose former semi-abusive boyfriend Conor Day (Aramis Knight) is the “tiger” of the NYC karate scene. But the blooming romance between Li and Mia lacks any sizzle to keep viewers invested, and the film as a whole labors until Chan’s character visits New York in order to train his nephew for the Five Boroughs Tournament, bringing LaRusso along as a second shifu.
The film’s most frustrating stretch comes a few scenes after Li gets whooped by Conor in a school yard fight. Conor clearly knows his martial arts, but it’s clear here that Li also has a long way to go. Except not long after, he shows off fighting talents that could have easily taken care of the high school bully. His new apartment is also right next to the pizza shop that Victor, Mia’s father (Joshua Jackson), owns; he’s borrowed from the wrong people, and now semi-murderous loan sharks intimidate him and the future of his pizza shop. Li, the skinny teenager, fights off a small crew of armed goons after Victor is hit upside the head with a baseball bat. The quality of choreography in this scene is never to be reached again, with the young kung fu fighter here jumping off buildings and using trash can lids Jackie Chan-style to repel the gang. (He later learns karate in a week). Hoping to earn the money to pay them off, Victor immediately hires Li to train him for a local boxing tournament. And while these scenes might actually be two of the best in the film, taken together, they hamper the drama. Where were these superstar moves earlier? Why is a grown man (and a grizzled veteran boxer) hiring a 120-lbs-soaking-wet 15-year-old to teach him to fight? The dissonance in Li’s skills from one scene to the next is striking, and tough to ignore.
But this isn’t the only problem of dissonance. Li and Mia have absolutely no chemistry, and the mismatch in the performers’ ages and their characters might play a role. Both do their best, but at 25 and 23, respectively, it’s tough for the pair to convincingly sell early high school romance, which so much of the drama here hinges upon. The TikTok-influenced filmmaking doesn’t help things either. Entwistle and cinematographer Justin Brown are both new to feature filmmaking and come from television shows explicitly targeted at Gen Z — The End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay with This being their biggest credits — and their work reflects the short-form “content” demands of their audiences, with every conversation between Li and Mia centering the speaker, while the editing takes care to always wait for them to finish their line before cutting to the next speaker.
On the more positive side of things, the comedic dynamic introduced via the two masters (of different martial arts) training Li in unison brings a new element into what has been, at times, a regretfully serious franchise. It also freshens up the otherwise worn training montages. The veteran actors also bring out the best in Wang, who is able in these scenes to flex more sides of skill than in the young love plot. It’s particularly noticeable how vulnerable Li gets with the older men in the film — both the two masters and Victor — something he never achieves with Mia. He never once, for instance, tells her about watching his older brother get killed after winning a kung fu tournament, but he has no trouble telling her dad. (Though on this point, it’s worth noting that the script deserves at least as much, if not more, of the blame than Wang.)
Karate Kid: Legends gives exactly what its fans will want: a cromulent child of the first film, hitting all of the same beats, and delivering the right mixture of old faces and old places. It certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it also wasn’t gifted a visionary director like, say, Creed was with Ryan Coogler. Rather, Entwistle appears to be a studio guy through and through — perhaps the next Jon Watts groomed and destined to make high-budget crowd pleasers. If the goal with Legends was to never deviate too far from past success and formula, then this latest Karate Kid does its job. By most other metrics, it is left wanting.
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Entwistle; CAST: Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Sadie Stanley; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: May 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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