Movie review: 'Karate Kid: Legends' is false advertising

UPI

28-05-2025

1 of 5 | From left, Jackie Chan, Ben Wang and Ralph Macchio star in "Karate Kid: Legends," in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment
LOS ANGELES, May 28 (UPI) -- Karate Kid: Legends, in theaters Friday, promises the merging of two Karate Kid worlds. Unfortunately, original star Ralph Macchio doesn't show up for 55 minutes and the film rushes through all the moments fans were waiting for, along with everything else.
Jackie Chan returns as Shifu Han from the 2010 Karate Kid remake. Han has a student in his Beijing dojo named Li Fong (Ben Wang), whose mother, Dr. Fong, (Ming-Na Wen) takes a job in New York and forbids Li to fight, or even practice, martial arts.
In New York, Li meets Mia (Sadie Stanley) working at her father, Victor's (Joshua Jackson) pizza restaurant. Mia's ex, Conor Day (Aramis Knight), trains at a mixed martial arts gym where Victor owes the owner money. Conor bullies Li just for being friends with Mia.
Karate Kid: Legends is much more about Li's relationship with Victor than with Daniel LaRusso (Macchio). Li uses Kung Fu he learned from Han to defend Victor against thugs from the gym's loan shark.
Victor is impressed and asks Li to teach him moves for the upcoming boxing match he entered in hope of paying off his debt and keeping the restaurant open. Making the new Karate Kid a teacher is an interesting twist, especially when he has to hide it from his mother.
A child teaching an adult fighter is the most original idea Karate Kid: Legends brings to the series. Unfortunately, the movie wants to do so much, it rushes through this relationship and its training montages, never exploring the pressure this puts on Li or the inversion of authority roles.
The film rushes through all the more familiar plot elements too, such as breezing through Li and Mia's relationship.
Wang and Stanley are charismatic young performers saddled with scenes and dialogue that are contrived to be unnaturally adult, especially when teenager Mia has an unusually mature perspective on her relationship with Conor.
Meanwhile, Conor is just a rage machine who already lost Mia before he ever met Li. The film only shows Li spend one day in school, though another rushed subplot shows Li studying with a calculus tutor (Wyatt Oleff).
The movie teases the reason Li no longer has an older brother when it is completely obvious the reason is martial arts. Dr. Fong said she already lost one son and Li has flashbacks to training with his older brother Bo (Yankei Ge), who is no longer in the picture.
Bo's fate is not a surprise so should not be milked as such. Still, the film can't decide whether Li is eager to use his martial arts or paralyzed with fear because of this traumatic event.
50 minutes into the movie, Han visits New York himself and decides to enroll Li in the Five Boroughs Tournament, the New York equivalent of The Karate Kid's All-Valley Karate Tournament.
This is a rather reprehensible act considering Dr. Fong's objection. A mother has every right to forbid her teenage son from competing in an MMA fight and Han shows up to not only enable it but encourage Li.
Han gives lip service to the idea that one tragedy should not make the rest of the family give up on martial arts, which ostensibly teaches positive qualities. That needs more nuance to justify training a teenager for hand-to-hand combat, a nuance the original films and the series Cobra Kai addressed.
Karate Kid: Legends is much more of a Jackie Chan movie than a Karate Kid movie. Li's fights and training of Victor are choreographed by Xiangyang Xu and executed by the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, clearly influenced by Chan himself, utilizing pots and pans or fire escapes in the choreography.
Chan-inspired movement is always captivating, even if it is not particularly well shot in Legends, with the camera often too close to see the entire move and cut together choppily. It's still an American Jackie Chan movie so it compromises what is great about his Hong Kong films.
Chan also finds moments to ham up his comedy, which livens up moments but is inconsistent with the 2010 film, in which he played Mr. Han dramatically.
Three-quarters of the way into a review seems the appropriate time to discuss Daniel LaRusso, because it is 55 minutes into the film when Han visits California to ask Mr. Miyagi's best student to help him train Li for the Five Boroughs Tournament.
Daniel only vaguely alludes to his life post Cobra Kai so as not to contradict anything in the series or potential spinoffs. His reasons for deciding to fly to New York after all are equally vague.
He mentions wanting to pass Miyagi's lessons on to as many new students as possible, which is why Daniel should have jumped at the opportunity Han was offering immediately.
Macchio and Chan have good chemistry in the brief scenes in which they are training Li, so it is a shame the film does not devote much time to exactly what Karate Kid fans, and martial arts fans in general, came to see.
Legends also retcons Mr. Miyagi adding a story about the Han family to his speech about the origins of Miyagi-Do from Karate Kid Part II. Though only audio, they either cast a soundalike or used AI to achieve this spurious connection.
There's also an absolutely laughable Photoshop job of 1985-era Jackie Chan with 1985-era Pat Morita.
Given Macchio's amenability to reprising his role in another movie, it is a shame the script could not find a more meaningful way to incorporate his character. Along with Daniel, Karate Kid: Legends underdevelops the very kid in the title as well.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.