REVIEW: ‘Karate Kid: Legends’ Is Earnest But Unbalanced

Karate Kid Legends, directed by Jonathan Entwistle and written by Rob Lieber, is an interesting legacy sequel. The movie opens with a brief moment from The Karate Kid Part II, retconning Mr. Miyagi’s (Pat Morita) family history to connect it with the 2010 remake. The movie thereby connects the original trilogy to the remake while completely ignoring anything that happened in it, as well as 1994’s The Next Karate Kid and the entirety of Cobra Kai.

Some of the movie is a smidge more emotional if you have context from the original The Karate Kid (1984). However, Karate Kid Legends stands pretty firmly on its own. The vast majority of the characters and plot are only related to previous movies, with Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) from The Karate Kid (2010) being Li Fong (Ben Wang), the main character of Karate Kid Legends’ uncle and sifu.

Karate Kid Legends takes the structure of its predecessors and turns it on its head. Like Danny before him, Li is a fish out of water teen forced to move across the world from Beijing to New York City when his mom (Ming-Na Wen) gets a new job as a doctor there. They’re both really running away from the tragic death of Li’s brother, Bo (Yankei Ge), a year earlier, but it takes some time for them to get to the point where they’re willing to admit it out loud, of course.

The earnestness of Karate Kid Legends is its greatest strength.

The movie is split into two very distinct and somewhat disparate halves. The first half of Karate Kid Legends continues to spin the usual Karate Kid narrative by declaring Li is banned from fighting (by his mother). Instead, he spends his time training his neighbor, Victor (Joshua Jackson), so he can use kung fu teachings to win a boxing match. Sure, Victor is an adult and the father of the girl Li immediately falls in love with the minute he walks into their pizza shop, Mia (Sadie Stanley). But Victor is a cool, young dad, and Mia isn’t too annoying about their relationship, so the disbelief is suspendible.

It’s suspendible especially because the movie is so earnest, something it also takes from its original source. The minute Li and Mia meet, they’re all in for each other. The same goes for Li and Victor and even Li and his very earnest tutor, Alan (Wyatt Oleff), who adds a few good chuckle moments to the movie. Earnestness and honesty are the movie’s strongest characteristics. When communication breaks down between Li and Mia, they talk it out like real, mature humans.

When Li messes things up between himself and Mia and Victor, or between Li and his mother, Mr. Han, with the full force of Jackie Chan’s trademark comedic timing, to push Li to stop sulking and show up there for the people he cares about. It’s wonderfully refreshing for a teen movie to show how simple communication makes all the difference in building and sustaining healthy relationships.

Where Karate Kid Legends starts to fall apart is when the stronger first half ends, and a completely different-feeling and looking movie begins. The sifu becomes the student once again in the second half, and Li is suddenly the one training to fight with the help of not only Mr. Han, but the original Karate Kid himself, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio). The second half of the movie is certainly still fun, if not a tad graphically violent, but it feels emotionally disconnected from the first half. The first half spends more time building up Li and Mia’s romance than anything else.

The two halves of Karate Kid Legends aren’t quite congruous.

Once things get rocky in the second half, Mia is gone for too long, and the very long training montage starts doing things graphically that were never part of the first half of the movie. There are fun quips between Mr. Han and Danny, and much of the action is well-shot. Even the older actors, especially Jackie Chan, have moments to show they’ve still got it.

But the second half is too long, and Li has no emotional connection with Danny, even as he ties Mr. Han’s lineage to Mr. Miyagi’s, so the payoff isn’t very deep. The time spent training just makes you miss the romance and found family emotions from the first half. Especially between Li and Victor—Li and Mia are alright together, but they’re too often shot from separate cameras instead of being on screen together while having some of their deeper conversations.

Karate Kid Legends is fun through and through, and its earnestness is quite charming when it’s going on. But the two branches of the movie aren’t nearly as congruous as the Miyagi family symbols are. If the emotional beats of the first half carried on through the second, the movie would stand a bit stronger. But as things stand, Karate Kid Legends just slightly misses the mark.

Karate Kid: Legends is playing in theaters May 30.