‘Karate Kid: Legends’ is an act of franchise hubris

Among Legends’ many issues is the fact that it’s actually two wildly different movies forced to co-exist. This sounds like a fun meta-textual tension, one that’s partially established in the opening prologue, which uses footage of a throwaway gag in The Karate Kid Part II (1986) to retroactively create a long history between the Miyagi and Han families across the East China Sea—“two branches of the same tree.” Unfortunately, the film is too unruly and unfocused to take advantage of this premise, the way Cobra Kai would eventually build on characters’ dueling philosophies for its sports manga antics. 

We first meet Beijing teenager Li Fong (Ben Wang, American Born Chinese) as he trains under his kung fu shifu Mr. Han, who happens to be his great uncle. Li’s mother (Ming Na Wen, The Joy Luck Club), a successful doctor, has just been hired at a hospital in New York, so she arrives to whisk him away to his new home—just as 1984 underdog LaRusso moved from Newark to the All Valley, and 2010 Detroiter Dre (Jaden Smith) packed his bags for Beijing. Legends’ premise appears, at first, similar to both previous iterations: a scrawny new transplant, who lives with his single mother, makes friends with a radiant young girl (in this case, Sadie Stanley’s Mia), whose overbearing, martial artist ex-boyfriend (Aramis Knight’s Connor) begins violently bullying the newcomer.

Legends, however, appears to move in an intriguing new direction, at least at first. Where LaRusso and Dre were novices, Li is already a trained martial artist, and given a mysterious tragedy in his past, his mother has forbidden him from fighting. As it happens, Mia’s father, the pizza shop owner and retired boxer Victor Lipani (Joshua Jackson), plans to get back in the ring for one last fight in order to pay off his mob debts, and he asks Li to train him. While this plot temporarily sidelines Mia and Connor, it makes for an intriguing inversion of the traditional Karate Kid dynamic, wherein an adult usually takes a teenager under their wing. However, this is also where Legends starts to feel like it's playing on fast-forward, because even this plot is quickly cast aside, so the movie can return to its familiar dynamics, and rope in some legacy characters en route to a breathlessly frantic final act, with no room for physical or emotional beats to land. 

The movie’s problems as a sequel begin early on. A peek at Han’s methods in Beijing hints at an egregious misuse of the series’ iconography, as his dozens of students can be seen training by practicing the fluid movement of taking off and putting on their jackets. “Jacket on, jacket off!” they repeat, echoing Han’s lessons from the 2010 movie, which happened to be an impromptu training device to teach Dre respect while acclimating him to the motions of kung fu. This was meant to mirror Mr. Miyagi’s iconic “wax on, wax off” car-cleaning ruse to teach LaRusso much-needed patience while stealthily passing down karate blocks. Both these methods were distinctly personal, and tailored to each pupil, so treating the former as a pop culture reference in-world betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of this story tenet.

What is perhaps just as disorienting is the fact that Legends does, in fact, come up with its own personal training devices, when Li begins using cooking items from Victor’s pizza shop—and, hilariously, the motions of spinning pizza dough—to similarly train Victor, making it clear that the movie is born from two dueling artistic instincts. On one hand, it wants to craft a personal and subversive story while paying spiritual tribute to what came before it. But on the other hand, it remains slavishly tethered to the images of movies past, to the point that these eventually subsume all attempts to create something new. 

In the process, the actual story of Li moving to a new city ends up malformed. Wang is charming and mischievous in the central role, and while Stanley isn’t quite as natural as his love interest, their dynamic is functional enough. However, as the tale of an outsider placed in a new environment, Legends makes clear early on that this isn’t really its focus. Wang maintains his American accent (though this is handwaved in the dialogue), and apart from a strange shot where Li seems confused by the concept of school textbooks, there don’t appear to be any challenges to him fitting in. As a specifically New York story, the film seems noncommittal too. Except for a fleeting moment where the subway becomes a unique venue for Li to train Victor, the city seems to move further into the background. Even Chinatown, the only neighborhood where Li speaks Mandarin (his first language), has but a cursory presence. 

Eventually, when the movie sidelines Victor and takes on a more traditional form, no more than 20 minutes elapse between Li entering a local, citywide karate championship (in which Connor is coincidentally a participant), and the arrival of the tournament’s final. During this climactic crunch, Han and LaRusso hastily re-enter the narrative, meet for the first time, and get roped into training Li with their contrasting methods, collapsing both branches of the Karate Kid series into little more than a string of montages with zero emotional weight. Additionally, the movie’s fights are shot so haphazardly and up close that they become just as incomprehensible as its story. Its bizarre structure, which sidelines the high school drama before yanking it back in at the last minute, not only renders the villainous Connor a complete non-character, but results in an awkward, half-baked final act where every line of dialogue compels Li to “remember what (he’s) fighting for,” when this really isn’t clear in any meaningful sense.

As a new version of an old story, Karate Kid: Legends shows immense promise. However, as a legacy sequel, it does too much in too little time, and remains far more concerned with shoving recognizable IP into the frame, regardless of how it derails ongoing proceedings. It also does all this while all but ignoring the events of Cobra Kai—this movie’s raison d'être—and, more importantly, ignoring that series’ meaningful inquiry into how the past has an unhealthy hold on the present, a lesson it could have sorely used.