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‘Karate Kid: Legends' Is a Kick for Hardcore Fans Only

‘Karate Kid: Legends' Is a Kick for Hardcore Fans Only

Yahoo29-05-2025

It was the crane kick seen 'round the world. There he is, skinny and picked-upon Daniel LaRusso, squaring off with the Cobra Kai dojo's resident Aryan-youth bully and ace leg-sweeper Johnny Lawrence, in the final round of the All-Valley Karate tournament. His sensei, Nariyoshi Miyagi, watches impassively from the sidelines as his prize pupil, already injured, is further hobbled by several less-than-kosher moves. LaRusso refuses to give up. He raises his arms, bird-like, and brings one leg up, precariously balancing on his bad leg. We've seen him try to master this move for the better part of the last hour. Miyagi nods his assent. Lawrence goes in for the kill. LaRusso kicks him in the face. He wins — the fight, the tournament, the girl, the movie. Watch this moment again if you haven't seen it for a while. It'll still make you want to jump out of your seat and cheer.
Nestled somewhere between Rocky Balboa sprinting up the Philadelphia Museum of Art's steps and the scoreboard-shattering home run in The Natural in terms of iconic sports-movie moments, the end of 1984's The Karate Kid remains one of those sequences that, even seen out of context, is pure triumph-of-the-underdog bliss. It's not a stretch to think that scene alone virtually underwrote two sequels, a LaRusso-less spin-off (1994's The Next Karate Kid), and a 2010 remake featuring Jackie Chan; the fact that the Hong Kong movie legend teaches Jaden Smith kung fu instead of karate didn't stop them from using the name. You don't mess with the brand, people.
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Love for the original never really faded, even if it was seen as more a blast from the past — one more thing to squeal over in an 'I Heart the '80s!' time capsule. If someone had told us that a Netflix series devoted to updating us on what happened to LaRusso, Lawrence and everyone else from back in the day would make folks highly invested in these characters again, almost 40 years later, we might have laughed them out of the room. If they'd said that the show would then go on for six surprisingly strong seasons, we'd have thought they were seriously high on drugs.
But it did, and it has, and thanks to the success of Cobra Kai and the allure of intellectual property and the never-ending need to turn nostalgia into future revenue streams, we now have Karate Kid: Legends. The basics remain the same: A young man — in this case, a Beijing teen named Li Fong (American-Born Chinese's Ben Wang) — is uprooted to a new city — in this case, NYC — and the fish-outta-water kid finds himself dealing with bullies who use martial arts for bad instead of good. Fong already knows kung fu, courtesy of Mr. Han, i.e. Chan's character from the 2010 redo. The wrinkle is that, because of a past family tragedy involving kung fu, he's forbidden to fight by his still-traumatized mom (Ming Na-Wen). Still, when you've got a movie that's putting a conspicuous 'dragon kick' on the mantle in Act One, that move is probably gonna go off in Act Three. This is officially known as the Chekhov Karate Kid Franchise Rule. Look it up.
There's a romantic interest, naturally, in the form of Mia Lipani (The Goldbergs' Sadie Stanley), who helps run the family pizza shop around the corner from the Fongs' downtown apartment. Her dad (Joshua Jackson) used to be a big deal in Gotham boxing circles before the birth of his daughter made him hang up the gloves. Except Pops owes some neighborhood no-goodniks money that he borrowed to open the pizzeria. And in what has to be the epitome of one-stop-shopping narrative convenience, these loan sharks also own the MMA dojo where Fong's tormentor, Conor Day (Aramis Knight), practices. Conor is the reigning champion of the annual '5 Boroughs' tournament. Also, Conor is Mia's ex. Also also, he's, like, a total dick!
Long story short, Fong trains Mr. Lipani, things don't go well, and once again, the peaceful warrior will be forced to take up the ways of the foot and fist. This requires Mr. Han to show up in New York and help his ward get back into fighting shape. It also requires the help of an old acquaintance of Han's, a gentleman of a similar age who's also got a history with martial arts and bullies and toxic masculinity and trying to outlive the past. He lives in Southern California. Three guesses as to who this might be.
So yes, what was once thought to be two different Karate Kid cinematic universes has been, in fact, one cinematic universe this whole time, and in a feat of pure corporate synergizing, Legends combines both of them into a super-duper KKCU. We're frankly surprised that the powers that be stopped at just those two — at one point, after a particularly dexterous three-against-one brawl in an alley set to LCD Soundsystem's 'North American Scum' (?!?), someone refers to Fong as the 'Chinese Peter Parker.' And given that Sony still owns some of the rights to the webslinger, you completely expect Tom Holland to swing in and go, 'Did someone mention my name?' and wink at the camera. Go full mega-multiverse or go home, you cowards!
In any case, one cross-country plane ride later, Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso join forces to school Fong in the ways of both karate and kung fu, with the hope that a 'two branches, one tree' hybrid of these martial arts will give him the edge in the 5 Boroughs tournament. Chan and Macchio admittedly have a nice sort of bickering rapport with each other — they're like a Punch and Judy team with actual punches being thrown. But there's a too-little-too-late aspect to their team-up, which means you have to suffer through pile-ups of subplots and peripheral dramatic business taking up a lot of oxygen and a gajillion montages.
(Seriously, find someone who loves you the way Karate Kid: Legends loves montages. There are training montages, of course, but also new-kid-in-high-school montages, scootering-around-Chinatown montages, pizza-making montages, tournament-bracket montages — we only counted three of the five boroughs in the main '5 Boroughs' montage, but never mind — and a few other montages we're likely forgetting. Whenever director Jonathan Entwhistle, a TV veteran responsible for The End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay With This among other shows, is at a loss, he drops in a montage. If he can also take a song on the soundtrack and slow it down as if a record player was running out of power, a trick that's clever the first time and annoying the proceeding 99 other times it gets used, all the better.)
Eventually, Legends gets around to the final showdown between Li and Conor, which takes place atop a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, and the outcome is never in doubt. It's all over but the dragon kick, and a coda with a fan-service cameo. We apologize for sounding cynical, but there's a slightly ramshackle feel to this that makes you feel that you're not watching a movie so much as math: Add two different Karate Kid stalwarts, multiply the nostalgia and stock story beats, divide the returns by half. We can handle corniness, which is a main ingredient for so many sports-underdog classics, but the cobbled-together feel is a downer. Hardcore fans may get their kicks from seeing Macchio and Chan together. Everyone else will just feel like tempted to sweep the legs of everyone trying to cash in on a recently revived franchise and wring it dry.
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Banks: I play a drunk who's lost her child and her husband, basically, to her little sister, played by Jessica Biel. She is grappling with trauma from her childhood, which she's trying not to bring forward. She's been working [with] Alcoholics Anonymous, an incredible program, to get through her stuff. But she's also a fish out of water when she visits her sister, who [lives in a] very rarefied New York, literary, fancy rich world. My character basically lives in a trailer park in Ohio. There's a lot going on. And there's a murder mystery. I loved the complication … but it brought up all of those things for me. I do think you absolutely leave most of that [heaviness] on set. You are mining it all for the character work, so you've got to find it, but I don't need to then infect my own children with it. Sacha, you have played and created these really gregarious characters like Ali G or Borat. Your character in 'Disclaimer,' he's not a character you created, but he is very understated. Was that a challenge? Cohen: It took me a long time to work out who the character was. I said to [director] Alfonso [Cuarón], 'I don't understand why this guy goes on that journey from where we see him in Act 1.' For me it was, how do you make this person unique? We worked a lot through the specificity of what words he uses and what he actually says to explain and give hints for me as an actor. A lot of that was Alfonso Cuarón saying, 'Take it down.' And there was a lot of rewriting and loads of drafts before I even understood how this guy reacts to the news and information that he believes about his wife. Jenny, 'Dying for Sex' is based on a true story about two friends. One has terminal cancer, and the other — your character — supports her right up until the end. Talk about what it was like to play that role in a series that alternates between biting humor and deep grief. Slate: Michelle Williams, who does a brilliant job in this show, her energy is extending outward and [her character] is trying to experiment before she does the greatest experiment of all, which is to cross over into the other side. My character is really out there, not out there willy-nilly, but she will yell at people if they are being rude, wasteful or if she feels it's unjust. [And she's] going from blasting to taking all that energy and making it this tight laser, and pointing it right into care, and knowing more about herself at the end. I am a peppy person, and I felt so excited to have the job that a lot of my day started with calming myself down. I'm at work with Michelle Williams and Sissy Spacek and Liz Meriwether and Shannon Murphy and being, like, 'Siri, set a meditation timer for 10 minutes,' and making myself do alternate nostril breathing [exercises]. Brian, many people came to know you from your role as Paper Boi in 'Atlanta.' The series was groundbreaking and like nothing else on television. What was it like moving out of that world and onto other projects? Henry: People really thought that I was this rapper that they pulled off the street from Atlanta. To me, that's the greatest compliment … When I did 'Bullet Train,' I was shocked at how many people thought I was British. I was like, 'Oh, right. Now I've twisted your mind this way.' I was [the voice of] Megatron at one point, and now I've twisted your mind that way. My path in is always going to be stretching people's imaginations, because they get so attached to characters that I've played that they really believe that I'm that person. People feel like they have an ownership of who you are. I love the challenge of having to force the imaginations of the viewers and myself to see me in a departure [from] what they saw me [as] previously. Because I realize that when I walk in a room, before I even open my mouth, there's 90 different things that are put on me or taken away from me because of how I look and how I carry myself. Javier, since doing the series are you now frequently asked about your own opinions on the Menendez case? The brothers claim their father molested them, and that is in part what led to them murdering their parents. Bardem: I don't think anybody knows. That's the point. That was the great thing about playing that character, is you have to play it in a way that it's not obvious that he did those things that he was accused of, because nobody knows, but at the same time you have to make people believe that he was capable. I did say to Ryan [Murphy] that I can't do a scene with a kid. Because in the beginning, they do drafts, and there were certain moments where I said, 'I can't. It's not needed.' The only moment that I had a hard time was when [Jose] has to face [his] young kid. It was only a moment where Jose was mean to him. That's not in my nature. Henry: I discovered, while doing my series, 'My body doesn't know this isn't real.' There's an episode where I'm shot in the leg, and I'm bleeding out and I'm on all this different morphine and drugs and all this stuff, and I'm literally lying on this ground, take after take, having to mime this. To go through the delusion of this pain ... in the middle of the takes, it was just so crazy. I would literally look at the crew and say, 'Somebody hug me! Somebody!' Stephen, that scene where you confront the boys in the parking lot with the bike, I was just like, 'Oh, my God, how many times did he have to do that?' This kid gets in your face, and I was like, 'Punch the kid!' My heart went out to you, man, not just as the character but as you being in there. Graham: Because we did it all in one take, we had that unique quality. You're using the best of two mediums. You've got that beauty and that spontaneity and that reality of the theater, and then you have the naturalism and the truth that we have with film and television. So by the time I get to that final bit, we've been through all those emotions. When I open the door and go into [Jamie's] room, everything's shaken. But it's not you. It's an out-of-body experience and just comes from somewhere else. Bardem: Listen, we don't do brain surgery, but let's give ourselves some credit. We are generous in what we do because we are putting our bodies into an experience. We are doing this for something bigger than us, and that is the story that we're telling. What have been some of the more challenging or difficult moments for you, either in your career or your recent series? Zellweger: Trying not to do what you're feeling in the moment sometimes, because it's not appropriate to what you're telling. That happens in most shows, most things that you do. I think everybody experiences it where you're bringing something from home and it doesn't belong on the set. It's impossible to leave it behind when you walk in because it's bigger than you are in that moment. Banks: I would say that the thing that I worked on the most for 'The Better Sister' was [understanding] sobriety. I'm not sober. I love a bubbly rosé. So it really did bring up how much I think about drinking and how social it is and what that ritual is for me, and how this character is thinking about it every day and deciding every day to stay sober or not. I am also a huge fan of AA and sobriety programs. I think they're incredible tools for everybody who works those programs. I was grateful for the access to all of that as I was making the series. But that's what you get to do in TV. You get to explore episode by episode. You get to play out a lot more than just three acts. Stephen, about the continuous single shot. It seems like it's an incredibly difficult and complex way to shoot a series. Why do it? Graham: It's exceptionally difficult, I'm not going to lie. It's like a swan glides across the water beautifully, but the legs are going rapidly underneath. A lot of it is done in preparation. We spend a whole week learning the script, and then the second week is just with the camera crew and the rest of the crew. It's a choreography that you work out, getting an idea of where they want the camera to go, and the opportunity to embody the space ourselves. Cohen: That reminds me of a bit of doing the undercover movies that I do because you have one take. ... I did a scene where I'm wearing a bulletproof vest. There were a lot of the people in the audience who'd gone to this rally, a lot of them had machine guns. We knew they were going to get angry, but you've got to do the scene. You've got one time to get the scene right. But you also go, 'OK, those guys have got guns. They're trying to storm the stage. I haven't quite finished the scene. When do I leave?' But you've got to get the scene. I could get shot, but that's not important. Henry: There's a certain level of sociopathy. Slate: I feel like I'm never on my mark, and it was always a very kind camera operator being like, 'Hey, Jenny, you weren't in the shot shoulder-wise.' I feel like such an idiot. Part of it is working through lifelong, longstanding feelings of 'I'm a fool and my foolishness is going to make people incredibly angry with me.' And then really still wanting to participate and having no real certainty that I'm going to be able to do anything but just make all of my fears real. Part of the thing that I love about performance is I just want to experience the version of myself that does not collapse into useless fragments when I face the thing that scares me the most. I do that, and then I feel the appetite for performance again. Do you see yourself in roles when you're watching other people's films or TV show? Graham: At the end of the day, we're all big fans of acting. That's why we do it. Because when we were young, we were inspired by people on the screen, or we were inspired by places where we could put ourselves and lose our imaginations. We have a lot of t— in this industry. But I think if we fight hard enough, we can come through. Do you know what I mean? It's people that are here for the right reasons. It's a collective. Acting is not a game of golf. It's a team. It's in front and it's behind the camera. I think it's important that we nourish that. Henry: And remember that none of us are t—. Bardem: What is a t—? I may be one of them and I don't know it. Graham: I'll explain it to you later.

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