I love the Karate Kid franchise, and I have since I was very little and watched the third installment – largely considered among the worst – on a rented VHS tape from a gas station in my tiny hometown. There’s just something about its entire energy that places it deep within the confines of 80’s culture, or revivalism in the case of its excellent revival Cobra Kai. The original film took the Rocky formula (both directed by John G. Avildsen), adjusted the ending for audiences in need of immediate gratification, and boiled everything else down to its bare essence. Everybody loves the story of a troubled teen with potential working out his issues in competition tournaments! Or maybe that’s just me. Still, it’s the one franchise that I will forgive for telling the same story over and over again, because it always goes down smoothly.
With Karate Kid: Legends we’re back at it again, this time the teen in question is Li Fong (Ben Wang), a transplant from Shanghai who was once a gifted student of the Kung Fu master Han (Jackie Chan). After his mother (Ming-Na Wen) gets a new job at a hospital in New York, and her urging that Li put the training aside due to a tragedy in their pasts, he finds himself a fish out of water in the Big Apple. He makes new friends, like local pizza delivery girl Mia (Sadie Stanley) and her father Victor (Joshua Jackson), new enemies (such as the usual Karate expert ponytailed bad guy, this one named Conor played by Aramis Knight), and finds himself caught up in the personal turmoil of Mia’s father. In turn, that leads to a (not so) long and winding road that finds Li needing to step back onto the mat, with the help of Han and the original Karate Kid himself, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio).
Jonathan Entwistle marks a fascinating choice of director for this project. His two adaptations of my pal Chuck Forsman’s graphic novels The End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay With This are both engaging takes on teen romance in somewhat divergent genre exercises. You can tell based on where this new Karate Kid’s strengths lie that Entwistle’s comfort zone was still centered in that semi-YA leaning spot. The first hour of the film is an engaging story of the new kid in town just trying to find his bearings, along with some pretty excellent action choreography – thanks to Jackie Chan’s Stunt Team. It should be noted, the fights in this are infinitely better than something like Shang-Chi, that was attempting the same sort of tribute to Chan in terms of action as a storytelling vehicle, but I digress.
The best moments of Karate Kid: Legends are when it’s not much of a Karate Kid film at all and instead is about a guy just trying to help a struggling family get out of debt. Li uses his Kung Fu training to teach Victor some new tricks and provide an able assist to his comeback in the boxing ring and the relationship between those two inverts the usual “Miyagi-Daniel/Sensei-Student” approach and freshens things up. Wang and Jackson have such excellent chemistry, I found myself bereft anytime we had to veer away from that. And that’s me, maybe the biggest Jackie Chan fan you know, saying this. All the same, the two acts are breezy and enjoyable in a way and if we could have stayed there for the finale, this would have my fullest endorsement for teen summer entertainment. But then comes the third act, and boy am I ever torn about it.
As you can imagine, Legends has to turn into a standard Karate Kid movie at some point and it all happens in the last 30 minutes. Han recruits Daniel, Han starts training Li to fight in the big “5 Boroughs” Karate Tournament and Daniel rushes over to join them. There’s a few montages and then the tournament starts at a breakneck pace. This stretch of the film is very strange to describe, it’s almost like watching an extended trailer for the actual movie. Or better yet, if you’ve seen any of the marketing for the film, you probably have seen the bit where Daniel hands over the Miyagi Do hachimaki to Li in what seems like a very poignant and important scene. Well, in the context of the actual film, it’s also part of a montage! One scene aside with Chan that establishes Han’s connection to the greater Miyagiverse, you start to wonder what Daniel is even doing in this movie. He interacts with no one else except Li and Han, and despite a rich premise of the intertwining of Kung Fu and Karate (“Two branches, One Tree”) it gets almost no exploration.
It’s also frustrating because fans of this franchise are being sold on this team-up and even if that failed to live up to expectations, there’s at least the tournament to fall back on. Well, I’m sad to say that gets rushed through too. If you’re going to introduce a character called The Queens Tornado, for example, it would be pretty cool if we actually got to see him and Li go at it for longer than 10 seconds. The editing, which was already heavy-handed going in, becomes outright frenetic in this final stretch. I’m not sure if this was Entwistle and team’s attempt to ape the kind of transitions you’d get on TikTok and CapCut, but it sure looked that way. I was really flummoxed, but in conversation with my partner afterward she had a theory that I think is probably right: Joshua Jackson’s boxer dad was likely the original counterbalance to Han in a story that tried to do more of an “East Meets West” kind of thing with boxing and kung fu, but after the popularity of Cobra Kai reinvigorated this dead as a doornail franchise, the screenwriter Rob Lieber quickly slotted in Daniel where he made the most sense. This may not be the case, but I really believe it now.
That said, I think there’s got to be at least 15-20 minutes or more on the cutting room floor that could have smoothed out the finale and given Daniel something to do and act as just a bit more of an emotional anchor in the story. But maybe, post-Cobra Kai it all just felt too redundant. We’ll never know.
Here’s what I do know: Ben Wang is an action star in the making and I hope we get to see more of him doing this kind of thing. We have a real scarcity of appealing ass-kickers these days. It’s also hard to get mad at a movie that’s 90 minutes and gets right out of the way, even with my biggest complaints, they vanish to the wayside when I think about what works instead.
The Karate Kid franchise, despite its need to credit DC Comics in every film (yes there is a superhero called Karate Kid, don’t get me started) has always shared DNA with Spider-Man – both are ultimately stories about kids from the margins discovering they’re capable of more than they imagined and shifting the setting to New York fully actualizes this. But where Peter Parker’s journey takes him above the skyline, Li Fong’s keeps him grounded, navigating the same streets at eye level. Maybe that’s what makes these stories land: they understand that the real battles aren’t in tournaments or against supervillains, but in finding your footing when the world keeps trying to sweep your leg. But admittedly, the tournament is always pretty nice to have.
In the end, that commitment to the tried and true still makes Karate Kid: Legends worth seeing. It’s a nice confection peppered with an exciting new star, Jackie Chan finally appearing in a solid film again, and providing just enough of that Cobra Kai feel to tide over those still bereft over its inevitable end. It’s hardly a classic, but it’ll do until the next one arrives.