Karate Kid: Legends — Jonathan Entwistle [Review]

Most legacy sequels frustrate in their imprisonment to the original films. The character cameos, repeated iconic lines, and mystery linkages between the past and the present all make for an easy money grab, as time shows again and again, but they also explicitly bog the films down. The best versions of the cycle of reboots and legacy sequels look like Creed, with an ambitious filmmaker trojan-horsing artistic merit into a myopic Rocky series. Karate Kid: Legends, the fifth film in the franchise, irks, then, because while it’s certainly not a great film, it disrupts this otherwise reliable pattern. All irony noted, it’s a film that’s at its best in all the recycled junk it peddles and at its worst in all other endeavors.

Legends finds its ceiling when the franchise’s former stars are on the screen. Ralph Macchio returns as Daniel LaRusso and Jackie Chan makes his second appearance as Mr. Han, and the screenplay begs for the viewer not to think for more than five seconds about their reasons for returning here. But the two elder statesmen are also this latest entry’s best performers. Director Jonathan Entwistle’s first feature also functions pretty serviceably as a remake, with Ben Wang in the role of Li Fong, this iteration’s mandatory geographic transplant who enters a martial arts tournament and fights a bully. But then the film begins to try new things and stray too far from the formula, and the results are dire. At this point, it’s clear that much like a child trick-or-treating in a small neighborhood and returning again and again to the same houses, the Karate Kid franchise will keep coming back until it no longer gets the goods it asks for — which is unfortunate, because now more than ever, the last thing we need is more formulaic blockbusters clogging cinema’s arteries.

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