Karate Kid: Legends brings together two sides of the Karate Kid universe, but it doesn’t significantly deviate from the formula established all the way back in 1984.
Ben Wang stars as Li Fong, who has trained in kung fu at his great-uncle Han’s (Jackie Chan) school in Bejing. When his mother, Dr. Fong (Ming-Na Wen), gets a job offer in New York City, she and Li move to America, with Li promising to give up fighting. Li befriends the father-daughter owners of a local pizza place, played by Joshua Jackson and Sadie Stanley, and runs afoul of local martial arts champion Connor Day (Aramis Knight), who is the reigning winner of the “Five Boroughs” tournament. Events eventually transpire to get Li into the tournament, where he aims to win the $50,000 prize to save the pizza parlor from loan sharks and to overcome his guilt over his brother’s death. He needs both Han and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) to help him train for the fight. The movie follows several familiar beats as the original movie, such as meeting a girl after moving to a new city, the local bully being both a karate champion and that girl’s ex-boyfriend, training for a big tournament, and so on. The movie doesn’t do anything particularly surprising or new with the franchise or its formula, except for a somewhat baffling plot decision to focus almost the entire first hour on Joshua Jackson, a former boxer whom Li helps train for a fight in an attempt to earn some cash. This leads to the whole selling point of the movie, the team-up of Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, which occurs over an hour into the movie, and, when it finally happens, it feels a bit rushed since half the movie’s runtime is gone. Fans of Cobra Kai will also have mixed feelings at best, as while it doesn’t retcon anything that happened in that series, there are also no references or mentions of anything that happened, with only a brief, fun cameo from a legacy character before the credits.
Ben Wang is a likeable protagonist who nails the physicality of the martial arts. The movie leans into the more flashy, over-the-top karate of Cobra Kai, with lots of flips, spinning kicks, and more advanced choreography. Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio have a relatively fun dynamic as they each try to teach Li a combination of karate and kung fu, but it feels like a watered-down version of the banter between Daniel and Johnny in Cobra Kai. Sadie Stanley and Joshua Jackson are also enjoyable, but Ming-Na Wen is wasted in a thankless role where she has to be a constant buzzkill until the script allows her to support Li’s fight. Aramis Knight doesn’t have much to do as the main villain and disappears for a considerable portion of the movie after his initial run-ins with Li. There aren’t the constant confrontations that Johnny and Daniel had in the original film, and you don’t get any sense of who he is or what the new evil Demolition dojo is about.
While Karate Kid: Legends delivers just enough nostalgia and flashy fights to satisfy casual fans, it ultimately plays it too safe, sticking entirely to the established formula, and it also pales in comparison to Cobra Kai. It’s not something you need to rush out and see, but it would be a solid watch on Netflix in a few months for Karate Kid fans.
