“Karate Kid: Legends” isn’t anything new. However, being the fifth film in a decades-long franchise (following a successful six-season television show, “Cobra Kai”), the 2025 martial arts “action, dramedy” gets a surprising amount of leverage out of the much repeated premise of “titular kid finds meaning in life via karate, fights bully, and wins girl.”
Through interesting action and shallow, but charming characters, this movie finds its voice after a shaky, exposition-heavy first act.
While there are new ideas, they are only new to the franchise, rather than contemporary film as a whole. What tests the might of “Karate Kid: Legends,” however, isn’t its ability to tell a whole new story, but rather whether it can tell an old tale with great charm.
While the film shares some resemblances with a poorly-executed Netflix special such as flat visuals and muted colors, Director Jonathan Entwistle, known for the TV series “I Am Not Okay With This,” imbues the film’s screenplay with a sense of plain fun.
He has a knack for getting a performer’s all onto the screen. Jackie Chan returns to Hollywood in full comedic form, and Ben Wang becomes a potential star with his impressive martial arts skills. Wang acts as this movie’s main character, Li Fong, making it delightful to follow his story through many, maybe too many, trials and tribulations.
“Karate Kid: Legends” ironically has an issue of balance, despite its two well-advertised masters constantly bickering about balance in the movie. While the film moves fast, making its two-hour runtime feel like a breeze to get through, it often feels like the movie is in a losing battle against its subplots.
Between a romance, a boxing tournament, a dead brother, a high school bully, a business in debt and multiple other threads, the film doesn’t allow itself to develop any one plot deeply enough to make them feel important to the overall journey of Li Fong.
Characters are left underdeveloped, seemingly changing their emotional reactions to the empty dramas of the film based on a predetermined ending the movie forces itself into, rarely allowing its audience a moment to create their own conclusion on the moral standings of our characters’ actions.
The film is interested in one thing: simple pleasure. Unlike the first “Karate Kid,” there’s a moodiness that is absent from this continuation. The original, and many films of the same genre, such as “Rocky” and “Creed,” often rely on breathing room as a means to create tension within the final fight.
The moment to allow the audience to understand the emotions of our main characters’ adversaries, their partners and their masters is key in intertwining each of those threads until they either form a glorious tapestry or fall apart in a devastating moment of loss.
“Karate Kid: Legends,” on the other hand, feels more concerned with creating means of moving onto the next, admittedly well-choreographed fight scene rather than imbuing those brawls with meaning other than the usual Chekhov’s Gun “signature move” seen in nearly every “Karate Kid” film.
The sequel is concerned with immediately pleasing its audience and giving them a consistent, simple dopamine hit of emotional or physical satisfaction, rather than earning a true moment of fuller emotional ecstasy by more successfully building on its cast of, again, admittedly charming, but shallow main characters.
Between an ex-boxer pizza shop owner, portrayed with great skill by Joshua Jackson, and the mourning mother of another karate-master child, played excellently by Ming-Na Wen, there is material rife with deeper exploration of character and the meaning of martial arts.
The film feels as if it begs for heart-thumping and fist-pumping reactions in its final act, but doesn’t quite earn them due to its lack of interest in creating worthwhile drama to get invested in, but rather constant reassurances of simple, empty joys.
However, “Karate Kid: Legends” still thrives as a fun popcorn flick. The film is an ideal viewing experience with friends or family, where one can fawn over the simple pleasures of solidly constructed action sequences and admittedly funny jokes, rather than worrying about the deeper emotional satisfaction that other films already exist to give you.
Overall, the latest installment in the “Karate Kid” franchise is a film that would thrive with another lesson in balance, but uses its signature move to win you over with its simple pleasures.
“Karate Kid: Legends” is in theaters Friday, May 30.
Copy edited by Emma Jolly
