Karate Kid: Legends

The Weight of the Crane Kick

Nostalgia is apparently never allowed to die with dignity. Every few years another studio drags a beloved property back into the light, buffs the old shine, and sends a new kid into the ring. *Karate Kid: Legends* sounds like exactly the kind of corporate recycling that should make your eyes glaze over, especially because it tries to stitch together the Miyagi-Do mythology of the original films with the kung fu lineage of the 2010 Jackie Chan reboot. That is a lot of franchise history to load onto a sports drama. The movie nearly buckles under it. Nearly. There is enough actual feeling in the middle to keep it standing.



Jonathan Entwistle is a sly choice to direct. His work on *The End of the F***ing World* showed a talent for the awkward, bruised texture of adolescence, and some of that survives the studio machinery here. Li Fong's move from Beijing to New York after a family tragedy is filmed less like an exciting relocation than an emotional displacement. The city rises around him like a set of walls. Ben Wang plays Li with a defensive slouch instead of the usual eager-underdog spark. He looks like a boy trying to make himself visually disappear.

The script, of course, will not allow that. Li gets pulled into conflict when his new friend Mia (Sadie Stanley), her father Victor (Joshua Jackson), and a local karate bully drag him toward the inevitable showdown. That also opens the door for the movie's big cross-generational play: Jackie Chan's Mr. Han and Ralph Macchio's Daniel LaRusso stepping in as co-mentors.



Watching Chan and Macchio share the frame is more interesting than the screenplay around them. Macchio stands with the upright rigidity of a man who has spent decades turning karate into a worldview. Chan feels heavier, quieter, more economical. On a rooftop training sequence in New York, they try to blend their styles for Li, and the choreography is clean and satisfying. What I liked even more was the friction underneath it: two older men realizing their trusted methods do not map cleanly onto a kid carrying very current grief.

Ming-Na Wen gives the movie its emotional ballast as Li's mother. After so many roles built on poise and control, seeing her vibrate with overprotective fear gives the whole film a steadier floor. She is the part that keeps this from floating off entirely into franchise self-regard.



The structural problems never quite go away. Once the movie sprints toward the mandatory Five Boroughs tournament, it starts cutting corners so quickly that the emotional stakes blur. *ScreenDaily* was fair to say the film "echoes the main plot points from the 1984 original, which only underlines how little kick this material maintains." I wouldn't go that far; there is some kick here. But Entwistle is clearly boxed in by the legacy template. The best parts are the smaller ones, when Li is just a grieving kid trying to learn how to defend himself without hardening into somebody else. In those moments, *Karate Kid: Legends* stops feeling like brand maintenance and starts feeling, however briefly, like its own movie.