29-05-2025
‘Karate Kid: Legends' Is a Kick for Hardcore Fans Only
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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