Overview
After a family tragedy, kung fu prodigy Li Fong is uprooted from his home in Beijing and forced to move to New York City with his mother. When a new friend needs his help, Li enters a karate competition – but his skills alone aren't enough. Li's kung fu teacher Mr. Han enlists original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso for help, and Li learns a new way to fight, merging their two styles into one for the ultimate martial arts showdown.
A kung-fu prodigy named Li Fong (Ben Wang) has been trained by his great uncle Han (Jackie Chan) against the wishes of his mother, Ming-Na Wen’s Dr Fong, who has already lost one son due to fighting. When Dr Fong takes a job that moves the pair to New York, Li initially finds it hard to fit in, until he encounters Mia (Sadie Stanley), a classmate whose father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), runs a pizza restaurant and who used to be a boxer. However Victor also has money troubles and is in debt to a loan shark, and so Li begins training Victor in techniques that could make him return to the sport and win enough to clear his debts. At the same time Mia has an ex-boyfriend who is part of a brutal karate school, and there is an upcoming fighting tournament with a big prize on offer.
If that sounds a little familiar – maybe overly familiar – it is because it is, given that all we are getting storywise are regurgitated ideas and tropes from the series of films that preceded this one. But, let’s be honest, you don’t watch a Karate Kid film for originality, and there is an expected repetition of themes in each entry, but maybe not to such a degree that there are basically two stories crashed into one short run-time.
On the positive side, the cast are all great. Ben Wang is immediately engaging from the start and makes for a wonderfully placed central presence, and the chemistry struck with Sadie Stanley as Mia draws you in swiftly – they pair up well on screen. Around them the support all serve their purposes well, and Macchio and Chan will always bring a smile to any long term fans of the series. The fights look to be well choreographed (Chan’s own academy of performers were involved, so this is no surprise), and as far as tropish box ticking pleasing moments, this manages to mark them all off, including a wonderful final fight tournament.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is undone by the overall film. Those well choreographed fights would have been served better had the editing not been too erratic at times, not allowing us to appreciate the moments themselves. The film basically forces two stories of someone being trained for a fight – first Victor being coached by Li, then Li being coached by Daniel LaRusso and Mr Han – with both segments including the obligatory montage sequence, eating up the run time for no real purpose, and feeling a tad too repetitive. With just over 90 minutes to play with, the result is we don’t get enough build up for the drama that is supposed to lead to the final confrontation in the last act. In addition, for a film marketed heavily around the legacy of the past, those legacy characters don’t have a lot of impact. LaRusso doesn’t even come into things until the final act, allegedly to weave karate into kung-fu (due to some inserted backstory about Han and Miyagi intending their two schools to be part of the same tree), but in the final fight it appears to be predominately already learned kung-fu moves that Li uses effectively, leaving you wondering what the point was.
Look, it’s fine, and is certainly better than some of the previous entries in the franchise, but it feels too short whilst trying to do too much, almost as though it should have been a TV series (which would have allowed the characters to develop and breath more). Maybe we’ve been spoiled recently with Cobra Kai, and that left a lot for this to live up to, but in the end Karate Kid Legends is just generic and lacking, despite having so much potential from the cast and style, and is likely to be forgotten in the franchise in the same way The Next Karate Kid is.
