Karate Kid: Legends Introduces Young Audiences to the Joy of Training Montages

You kinda have to hand it to Karate Kid: Legends for deploying a tremendous generational bait-and-switch. Anyone catching this multi-purpose sequel out of nostalgic desire to see original Karate Kid Ralph Macchio on the big screen again, now teamed up with Jackie Chan’s character from the 2010 Karate Kid remake, may be surprised to find a different former teen idol taking center stage, at least at first. Instead of 1984’s Macchio, 1998’s Joshua Jackson – Pacey from Dawson’s Creek – is the movie’s resident Italian-American guy for the first 45 minutes or so. Given that the original film series ran for 10 years, the remake became a smash in 2010, and the TV show spinoff Cobra Kai recently finished a six-season run, it’s remarkable that the filmmakers managed to center Jackson, an actor whose dead-center target demo of millennials may be the only group without fond memories of the aforementioned Karate Kid properties. (Maybe some late adopters got into it through The Next Karate Kid, starring future Oscar winner Hilary Swank.)
Of course, The Karate Kid, the original 1984 film, has endured beyond lol-so-’80s appreciation. It doesn’t just share director John G. Avildsen and composer Bill Conti with the 1976 underdog boxing story Rocky; it’s basically a kid-movie version of that Best Picture winner, with more charm than any of the official Rocky sequels that also might have attracted kids back in their day. Rocky had a stirring revival in 2015 with the kickoff of the Creed series; Karate Kid: Legends is not that. It’s not even the Fast Five-style all-star affair that seems intended via its belatedly yoking together of previously separate continuities. But it is a solidly sweet and corny live-action children’s film at a time when kids are mostly being sold live-action remakes of perennial streaming-service rewatch faves.
That’s not to say that Legends lacks nostalgic regurgitations of its own. But it does find a novel way into essentially remaking the old movie with less grit. The first movie sent New Jersey’s own Daniel LaRusso (Macchio) into a new life in Los Angeles, where he learned to defend himself from bullies through the teachings of Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita). The remake sent the younger Dre (Jaden Smith) from Detroit to Beijing, where he underwent similar tutelage from Mr. Han (Chan), only with kung fu instead of karate. The newest film finally focuses on an Asian lead, with teenage Li Fong (Ben Wang) moving from Beijing to New York with his mother (Ming-Na Wen) following a family tragedy.
That tragic backstory eventually explains why his mother forbids Li from continuing his study of kung fu, which he began at Han’s school back in Beijing. But Li finds a way around it when he offers to train Victor (Jackson), a past-his-prime boxer who wants to get out of debt by getting in the ring one more time (or maybe twice). This worries Mia (Sadie Stanley), Victor’s daughter and a new schoolmate of Li, but she likes the new kid and seems ready to move on from her hot-tempered ex Connor (Aramis Knight, of Into the Badlands), yet another young fighter who studies exclusively at one of those evil dojos.