The ‘Karate’ Doesn’t Have a Kick
The original “The Karate Kid” was so much fun, they made a bunch of sequels of steadily decreasing quality. But at least they all had one thing in common: They were all about karate.
The newest version of “The Karate Kid” — this one is simply called “The Karate Kid” — doesn’t actually have any karate in it. Instead, it’s a movie about kung fu, as you might expect from a martial arts movie set in China.
Why the filmmakers didn’t just go ahead and call it “The Kung Fu Kid” is a question for scholars to ponder in the future, but they won’t be pondering it very much because the movie is such an unremitting bore. When you watch it, time seems to stand still. If I had just two hours to live, I’d want to spend them watching this movie, because the two hours would feel like five.
Nearly everything that goes wrong with this picture is the result of one ill-advised decision: The producers hired Jaden Smith, the young son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, to be their star. Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the producers are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.
Jaden Smith is a natural actor, as he proved in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” But that was a supporting role, and as is almost always the case with children, he simply cannot carry an entire movie by himself. While his character in “The Karate Kid” is 12, Smith himself is 11, going on 9. In contrast, in the original movie, the character was around 16, and the actor who played him, Ralph Macchio, was a youthful-looking 23. Macchio was mature enough to play his role, while Smith cannot yet command the camera.
Using Smith also necessarily makes the main character younger, which ushers in a certain creepiness. Now the somewhat older thugs who beat him up don’t seem like bullies so much as child abusers, and the overly competitive man who directs their actions should probably be tossed in jail. The overly youthful Smith isn’t charming, he is whiny, and his nascent romance isn’t sweet, it’s a little icky.
Other than transferring the action to Beijing, the filmmakers adhere quite closely to the original story. Dre, played by Smith, is the new kid in school and his innocent interest in a young violin prodigy earns him the ire of a gang of toughs who are experts in kung fu. After he is beaten a couple of times, the apartment maintenance man agrees to teach him kung fu so he can defeat them in an upcoming tournament.
The maintenance man is played by Jackie Chan, who might not be a great actor but who is certainly an enlivening presence on the screen. Meanwhile, Dre’s mother is played by Taraji P. Henson, who is a great actor. Yet both Chan and Henson are relegated to supporting roles here, trying to prop up a vanity turn by an undersized 11-year-old.
To the film’s credit, the audience loudly cheered the last 10 minutes, the tournament scene in which the poor underdog bravely fights against his disciplined, well-trained and sadistic rivals. The scenes are obvious and filmed with a camera so shaky it is often impossible to tell what is happening, but the audience screams and claps and roars its approval.
It must have awakened just in time.
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.TheBoomerMagazine.com. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer magazine.
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