But deep down you already knew that
Amidst the current storm of nostalgia-exploiting remakes and sequels it’s easy to forget that untinted by the rose-coloured glasses of memory many of the films audiences grew up with throughout the ’70s ’80s and ’90s weren’t very good anyway. You thought the new Star Wars trilogy was a wooden bore? Have you watched A New Hope recently? You didn’t like the aliens at the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ? When did we all forget that the first Indie film concerned a travel trunk full of laser ghosts ?
The Karate Kid remake directed by Harald Zwart ( Pink Panther 2 ) and starring Jaden Smith (son of Will) has the unique advantage of reimagining a film whose most ardent fans will gladly — gleefully — admit is little more than camp melodrama. Despite the many paths that relative freedom from audience expectation creates however Zwart takes the one that offers the least resistance. This new Karate Kid while commendable for its updated dialogue beautifully photographed setting and bone-crunching martial arts sequences is ultimately just an amplification of the lazy storytelling endemic of so many ’80s crowd-pleasers. Smith’s Shao Dre might be a leaner more agile version of Ralph Macchio’s Daniel San but the film around him is a bloated ham-fisted achingly sentimental exercise in pointless revivalism.
Everything about this new Karate Kid is bigger and broader than the original. Where Daniel and his mother moved to a new town where he was picked on by kids who practised Evil Karate here Dre and his mom move to China where Dre’s alienation could only be emphasized more if he was literally kept in a cage. Where Daniel’s sensei Mr. Miyagi was conflicted over his family’s death during the Second World War here Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han actively manifests his grief in a scene that takes place in a thunderstorm. Where Daniel had a lightning-fast crane kick Dre has a preposterous gravity-defying flip manoeuvre. Add inspirational music that cues up every time a scene ends and you have one of the most unintentionally silly underdog stories ever told (twice).
Like the bleating acolytes of other iconic franchises Zwart conflates the original story’s dumb frivolity with its heart. One hundred nuked refrigerators couldn’t distract from Indiana Jones IV’s completely intact spirit of high adventure. A sluggish two hours of clumsy character development too many go-nowhere subplots and an absurd sense of false grandeur on the other hand easily obscure the enduring coming-of-age story that still exists somewhere at the centre of The Karate Kid.
