I went into the screening of The Karate Kid intrigued by the trailers but not expecting much. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much.
The basic story is the same as the original – kid has to move to a new city; meets a cute girl; gets bullied; learns a martial art; wins the girl and a martial arts tournament – but it’s the variations on the original that create engaging differences.
Instead of the original’s adolescent first love, we’ve got ‘tween puppy love; instead of karate, we’ve got kung fu [the title is a brand and you don’t mess with a brand]; instead of moving across a continent, our kid moves halfway around the world – to a totally new culture, and so forth.
Dre Parker [Jaden Smith] is the twelve-year old protagonist who suddenly finds himself in China and set upon by bullies when he sparks the interest of Meiying [Wenwen Han], a pretty violin prodigy. The chief of these, Cheng [Zhenwei Wang] is a particularly vicious sort – and the prize student of a hung fu school where the instructor insists on mercilessness.
Unable to understand her son’s intense yearning to return to Detroit, Sherry Parker [Taraji P. Henson] does her best to try but it is their apartment building’s grizzled handyman, Mr. Han [Jackie Chan] who actually sees what Dre is up against – and decides to help him.
Harald Zwart – best known for The Pink Panther 2, One Night at McCool’s and Agent Cody Banks – turns out to have a flair for more dramatic material. He does a nice job of balancing character moments with action set pieces, and gets some terrific performances from the child actors in the cast. It doesn’t hurt that the screenplay – Christopher Murphey’s reworking of the original Robert Mark Kamen story – pays a lot of attention to developing the main characters.
Jaden Smith may not be the actor his father is, but he is very good here and he has a lot presence – something rare in actors of his age. He also trained hard for the role – he does the majority of his own stuntwork – and his seven years of studying martial arts certainly helps make Dre’s progress from bullied kid to tournament competitor believable.
Not many people give Jackie Chan credit for being a very good actor – most of his North American fans know him only a kind of martial arts star with a knack for humor and turning anything at hand into a fighting prop. Perhaps his role as Mr. Han will change that. This is a character with a tragic past [like Mr. Miyagi in the original] who seems weighed down by a terrible melancholy. Then, when he comes to Dre’s aid at a key moment, the melancholy lifts and he begins to see this American kid as someone who can give him his life back even as he teaches him.
The Karate Kid Mark II is much longer than the original film but this is probably because giving the audience some understanding of the Chinese culture [especially without getting into politics, which would be a bummer for a summer flick] is a more difficult thing than setting up the differences between Jersey and L.A.. There are a lot more similarities between Jersey and L.A. than there are between Beijing and Detroit. Plus, there are some magnificent vistas that are used to both amplify Dre’s sense of dislocation and bring him into the required mindset to learn kung fu.
Of course, you can’t have a Karate Kid movie without a training montage and this one both respects the original and has fun with its differences. The only down side is that ‘jacket on, jacket off, jacket down’ isn’t as catchy, or succinct, as ‘wax on, wax off.’
This version of The Karate Kid isn’t, quite, as good as the original [though it kicks its the three sequels into the dirt and laughs at them] but it is a very entertaining film that does its job with both substance and style.
Final Grade: B+