Karate Kid: Legends is Confusingly a Screamingly Faithful Sequel Yet Also Secretly a Joshua Jackson Boxing Movie

If you enjoy predictability and are nostalgic for The Karate Kid and Dawson's Creek then boy do we have a movie for you!

I was eight years old when The Karate Kid was released. It wasn’t just a sleeper hit that made a star out of Ralph Macchio and an Oscar nominee out of breakout star Pat Morita. It was a goddamn pop culture sensation. You couldn’t go anywhere without getting kicked in the head by a fan doing the film’s trademark Crane Kick. It was a public health menace. I myself was attacked dozens of times.

The Karate Kid had a revolutionary conceit: what if a white person did martial arts? Kung Fu, Karate, Tae Kwan Do, and whatnot are all Eastern arts shamefully created and perfected by non-whites. The Karate Kid made a shit-ton of money and a huge cultural impact because it foreground a caucasian yet still had enough pity to prominently include an Asian gentleman in a key role. I’m sure they wanted to cast Mickey Rooney as Mr. Miyagi, but in an early instance of “woke,” they put a lesser-known actor in the role solely for the sake of cultural over-sensitivity.

The sequels to a blockbuster that helped popularize karate in the United States were even more woke. Like a bunch of commies, the makers of The Karate Kid Part 2 fled the greatest country in the world for a story shamefully set in Japan. That means all those yen went to a bunch of foreigners who hate our way of life instead of hard-working, patriotic, non-union-joining Americans.

In an unethical instance of DEI run amok, Communist man-haters at our nation’s universities convinced a brainwashed studio that they needed a new Karate Kid, and that he shouldn’t have a penis.

That’s right. The New Karate Kid illegally replaced Ralph Macchio with Hilary Swank. The result was a critical and commercial disappointment that disgusted everyone with its flagrant embrace of diversity, which is famously a thought crime punishable by death. Only by killing the people responsible for woke and DEI can we truly end the scourge of Cancel Culture.

Then these inclusion-crazed monsters added color, and consequently race-baiting, and race-hatred to the mix by casting Jaden Smith, a weird child of color who posts inscrutably yet pretentiously on social media, as an even newer karate kid, this one a more “urban” protagonist, a "soul brother” from “the street" who “really gets down and funky.”

In the focus groups that undoubtedly led to Karate Kid: Legends, respondents undoubtedly expressed love and enthusiasm for Jackie Chan, who played the Mr. Miyagi teacher character in the reboot, and threatened to murder everyone involved if they welcomed that monster Jaden Smith back into the fold.

I thought that they handled his absence in a disrespectful way as well. There’s a minute or so where Chan’s mentor says that Smith’s protege died after he broke his neck trying to perform oral sex on himself, but nobody cared because he was so annoying.

There was another line about Chan being the only one at his funeral, but it was cut.

Now, the forces of nostalgia and cynical commerce have brought into existence Karate Kid: Once More for the Money, I mean, Karate Kid: Legends.

In an even more unforgivable act of subversion and perversion, Karate Kid: Legends brings back Ralph Macchio, the original Karate Kid.

Instead of doing the honorable thing and making the martial arts skills of the 63-year-old Macchio the film’s centerpiece, Legends awkwardly shoehorns The Outsiders star into a superfluous supporting role so that it can focus on a main character who isn’t even white!

Even more disastrously, the actor playing him is non-white as well, which violates at least 6 or 7 laws.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: asians have no business doing martial arts, onscreen or off. That should be reserved for white people like Billy Jack star Tom Laughlin.

Despite my strong feelings, Karate Kid: Legends is a vehicle for handsome, charismatic young actor Ben Wang as Li Fong, the even newer Karate Kid, and confusingly, Dawson’s Creek heartthrob Joshua Jackson.

Karate Kid: Legends offers a real bait-and-switch. It’s sold as a movie that gives us what we want, deserve, and angrily demand by bringing together the most popular non-dead characters from the 1984 original and the less well-received 2010 reboot.

Instead, it’s a movie that devotes half its runtime to a subplot in which a pizzeria owner, played by Jackson, attempts a comeback with the help of his daughter’s charismatic young friend.

It’s as if they made a Joshua Jackson boxing movie, and when they proudly brought it to distributors, they said, “You idiots! There’s no audience for a Joshua Jackson boxing movie. Can you make it, I dunno, a Karate Kid legacy sequel?

BOOM! They threw in some scenes with Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, and suddenly had something a little more commercial and likely to get a theatrical release instead of playing only Joshua Jackson’s living room.

That’s the crazy thing: Karate Kid: Legends is semi-secretly a Joshua Jackson movie, yet it’s also the most slavishly faithful remake/reboot imaginable, a retread committed to giving audiences exactly what they think they want, how they want.

The filmmakers are slaves to the franchise and to expectations. It’s a movie without a goddamn single surprise. That’s both its limitation and the source of its second-hand charm.

Karate Kid: Legends opens with a prologue set in the 1980s, where Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi explains the close relationship between the Miyagi and Han martial arts dynasties.

Karate Kid: Legends hits the beats of the original with literal-minded reverence, while duct-taping together connections between the mythologies of the 2010 and 1984 films.

We then segue to modern-day Beijing, where Li is secretly studying martial arts under the tutelage of great-uncle Mr. Han (Chan), a respected teacher and the heir to the family dynasty.

For reasons too achingly melodramatic to extound upon, Li’s mother forbids him to practice martial arts or participate in violence after his brother dies tragically and clumsily.

Li moves to New York with his doctor mother and meets cute with Mia LaPini, the appealing daughter of former boxer Victor Lipani (Joshua Jackson).

This marks the beginning of the distressingly long Joshua Jackson-focused portion of the film. Li helps his crush’s old man dust off the cobwebs and utilize his mastery of Eastern arts to help him punch better.

The Karate Kid hews so snugly to the franchise’s time-tested formula that it exists perpetually on the precipice of self-parody.

The bad guy, for example, couldn't be more of a generic bully. He's racist, the boyfriend of the girl our hero desires, his dad is a martial artist, AND, for good measure, he’s the top martial artist in the city.

He’s consequently the foe our hero must face off against in the big tournament match that closes the film.

In another world, that might count as a spoiler, but it is impossible to spoil a movie with zero surprises.

Karate Kid: Legends picks up with the third-act re-introduction of Chan’s rascally Mr. Han. Mr. Han insists that Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso help him train his gifted prodigy solely for the sake of box office and credibility.

Even Macchio seems confused as to why he’s in the film. He seems flattered, but mostly he appears perplexed as to why the filmmakers forced him into the action like a stubborn child trying to fit a circle into a triangular-shaped hole.

Karate Kid: Legends benefits from a charismatic lead performer, as well as zippily choreographed fight scenes and montage sequences set to peppy pop songs. It’s exactly what you think it will be and a little less.

My son said he’d like to see The Karate Kid before its legacy sequel. He never got around to it, but now I feel like he has seen The Karate Kid because this ragingly unnecessary follow-up is, in true sequel tradition, exactly like the original but not as good.

Two and a half stars out of five