Karate Kid: Legends
The latest "Karate Kid" is a fun, familiar, family-friendly piece of cinematic comfort food.
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“Karate Kid: Legends” (now in theaters) is cheesy, predictable and satisfying. It’s a Stouffer’s lasagna or mac and cheese kind of a movie, i.e. cinematic comfort food.
Li Fong (Ben Wang) is made to move from Beijing to New York by his doctor mother (Ming-Na Wen) after the death of his brother Bo (Yankei Ge). This means he’ll have to cease training in kung fu with his great uncle/shifu Mr. Han (Jackie Chan, reprising his role from 2010’s “The Karate Kid”).
Li isn’t happy about the move, but quickly makes friends with pizzeria proprietor and former boxer Victor Lipani (Joshua Jackson) and his comely daughter Mia (Sadie Stanley). Just as rapidly Li makes an enemy out of Mia’s ex-boyfriend/Five Boroughs martial arts champion Conor (Aramis Knight of AMC’s “Into the Badlands”), who in true “Karate Kid” fashion begins bullying his romantic rival.
Victor owes money to O’Shea (Tim Rozon), the jerky owner of the gym at which Conor trains and the sort of cat to whom you don’t wanna be indebted. Li balances training Victor in the ways of kung fu to help ensure a KO in his return bout with college preparatory calculus tutoring alongside the nerdy Alan (Wyatt Oleff, he played the young Stanley Uris in Andy Muschietti’s “It” movies).
Circumstances dictate that Li will need to enter the Five Boroughs Championship against his mother’s wishes putting him on a collision course with Conor. Conveniently enough, Han’s visiting from Beijing as Li begins training and recruits mutual Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) friend Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) to assist.
“Karate Kid: Legends” as directed by Jonathan Entwistle (he’s the English filmmaker behind the Netflix shows “The End of the F***ing World” and “I Am Not Okay with This”) and scripted by Rob Lieber (he’s generally adapted kids books into movies with “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” “Peter Rabbit” and “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween”) is a fun albeit familiar family-friendly flick. That doesn’t mean Entwistle and his collaborators don’t have some surprises up their gi sleeves. Fight sequences are enlivened with video game-ish ornamentation via editing, sound design and special effects.
The good guys are super-likable and the bad guys aren’t. I especially enjoyed Jackson, ever-playing the student between learning the Flying V as a kid in “The Mighty Ducks” to being taught the one-inch punch by Li here.
Wackiness abounds in “Karate Kid: Legends” – Li beats up O’Shea’s goons to the tunes of LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum” in a film financed with Chinese money and much of the enterprise feels as if it were sponsored by Marco’s Pizza and PepsiCo (between this and last year’s “Madame Web” Sony and Pepsi seem to be the best of bedfellows).
Despite its goofiness I had a great, nostalgic time with “Karate Kid: Legends” and suspect my fellow fans of the franchise will as well. I often complain about movies being too long – I could’ve gone for more of this one.