A while back I came across the original Karate Kid movie and pointed out what I felt were glaring problems with the movie. Recently, I had the opportunity to see the remake of the Karate Kid movie that isn’t all that old yet.
It’s a similar story. Single mom moves kid to crappy location where our hero finds himself out of place. In the original, Ralph Macchio goes to somewhere in California where being a whiny bitch isn’t tolerated by karate-waging bad dudes with a sadistic sensei. In the new one, Will Smith’s son finds himself in China when his mom can’t turn down a job that must have been so lucrative that she had to take them both to China. But no, they’re in one of those hell holes that can only be maintained by a wise old Asian dude with mystical powers and secret martial arts skills who can turn a regular kid into a master by making him do his chores. The boy, Dre Parker, is sent to a regular Chinese school where of course he is tormented by a gang of thugs proficient in martial arts. Globally, let’s face it, just about every school has one of these. He obviously doesn’t know any Chinese, and they never really explained how he was learning anything in that school except how to get his tray knocked out of his hands.
The story pretty much goes the way of the original. Dre is not quite as annoying as Ralph Macchio, but then again how could he possibly be? At least he appears that he could be the slightest bit athletic. He is very small though. But thankfully the Chinese guys are kind of small, too. Jackie Chan stars as the maintenance man who begrudgingly (yeah, right) teaches the youngster how to learn Kung Fu. Though he can’t trim a tiny tree to save his life.
Since Dre figures that bad guy Cheng knows all about the crane move from the original movie, he instead defeats him using the “snake”. Which looks pretty much like the crane except that he moves his head to the side which seems to confuse Cheng. “Hey I’ve been kicking this guys ass all year, but now he kind of looked at me funny and turned his head like a snake. AHHH, WHAT DO I DO NOW???”
Thing to take away from the movies:
If you find yourself in a unfortunate bullying situation but can manage to find a handyman who is also master of the martial arts and has magical ancient healing skills and is a great teacher who can turn your lame ass into a karate superstar who can kick the crap out of an entire team of bad guys even when their psychotic teacher makes them cheap shot you repeatedly…well, then you’ll earn their respect and even cause them to turn their back on the longtime master to finally find the true meaning of sportsmanship.
But, in case that you can’t quite pull all of that off, you’ve got many years of ass kickings by a team of roundhouse-wielding bullies to look forward to. Enjoy.
I liked this one better than the original. Will Smith has an amazing son.