There will be rigorous training, beginning with the repetition of a simple, menial task, in this case taking off and hanging up a jacket (rather than the car waxing in the first movie). You don’t have to be familiar with the first “Karate Kid” or even with the trailer for this one to know what will happen. Dre’s crush on Mei Ying (Han Wenwen), an aspiring violinist, does not help matters, since she’s a childhood friend of Cheng, the main bully.Įnter, grumbling and shuffling, a humble handyman who turns out to be Jackie Chan. He falls victim to a group of bullies whose ringleader is Cheng (Wang Zhenwei), a star pupil at a quasi-fascist kung fu academy. (And this is not quite a Hollywood movie, but rather a Chinese-American co-production.) There are visits to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and a mountain temple, but mostly there is the lively bustle of workaday Beijing.ĭre and Sherry have moved there from Detroit, fleeing sad memories of Dre’s father’s death and seeking the kind of job opportunity that has vanished from the Motor City. “The Karate Kid” is very long ( 2 hours 12 minutes), dramatically thin and unevenly acted, but it was filmed almost entirely in China, mostly Beijing, and it has an unexotic, lived-in sense of place unusual in current Hollywood movies. The relocation turns out to make a big difference. The new version duplicates its story, but moves the action to China, where the title character, a 12-year-old named Dre (Jaden Smith, the son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, producers on the film), has moved with his mother, Sherry (Taraji P. The first movie, released in 1984, with Pat Morita as the wise old mentor and Ralph Macchio as his protégé, tapped into so many archetypes (the polite word for clichés) that it could have been made at any time. “The Terminator,” for instance, and Bruce Willis.īut the new “Karate Kid” is not driven completely by nostalgia. A lot of franchises that started out back in those kind-of-innocent, not-so-simple times have kept on going ever since. It’s hardly surprising, since the kids who grew up watching the movies and television of that decade “The A-Team” and “The Karate Kid,” to restrict ourselves to films opening this week are now old enough to make and approve projects of their own. You don’t need a hot tub time machine to tell you that we are in the midst of an ’80s pop-culture revival.
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