You see so much of the country, from the urban sprawl of Beijing to the aforementioned Wudang Mountains, a setting so beautiful that it will take your breath away, and it adds a whole lot to the production and scale of the movie.
Whoever decided to set it in China, and to take full advantage of the cultural and geographic landmarks, was a genius. Eventually, the master and the student learn more about each other (and about themselves), with all of the required underdog sports movie story beats all present and accounted for, including the climactic, big scale arena showdown, with Dre entered into a huge kung fu tournament.Īnd while the story is by-the-numbers, the movie is still quite an accomplishment. Han teaches him self defense, taking him into the beautiful, ancient Wudang Mountains for one lesson on top of the Great Wall of China for another. One of the movie's greatest assets is its ability to put you in the shoes of a ten-year-old kid moving from America to China, wary and unknowing, besieged by his mother to accept the opportunity with open arms while feeling insecure and out-of-place.ĭre is picked on by schoolyard bullies and eventually befriends the maintenance man in their building, Mr. Henson, stealing every scene she's in), from the mean streets of Detroit to Beijing. 'The Karate Kid,' directed by Norwegian commercial director Harald Zwart, begins with Dre (Smith), moving in with his mother Sherry (Taraji P. It's rousing in all the right ways, will have you on your feet at the end, and has a surprisingly solid emotional core, rooted in heartache, that gives the movie a nice twinge of melancholy. So it pleases me to report that 'The Karate Kid' remake rebuffs my previous indifference: it's a solid little sports movie - well shot, well acted, and well directed. So when the news came that Sony would be doing a big budget remake of the original, transposing the original American location to China, turning the young New Jersey boy into an African American youth (Will Smith's son, Jaden Smith), and making the central martial arts form not karate, as the title suggests, but kung fu, I didn't bat an eye. (Was that the third one?) Still, I knew enough to chuckle at the 'Karate Kid' reference in 'The Social Network.'
In fact, my most vivid recollections come from the one where they're protecting that tiny tree. And I have only passing memories of the franchise as a whole.
You could argue that this is all predictable kids' stuff, but it works hard to earn its emotional payoff, and, let's face it, the story is no more ridiculous than Rocky.Personally, I had no strong emotional connection to the original ' Karate Kid.' I've seen it, but it wasn't something I watched a lot when I was younger. Cue unorthodox training montages, surrogate father-son bonding and the violent dispatching of evil teens. "The best fight is the one you avoid," Chan tells his new disciple, before putting grasshopper up for the Big Tournament without even asking him. Enter Jackie Chan, dialling it down as Smith's janitor-cum-guru. You know where things are going from the moment this cocky, cornrowed American sets foot in Beijing and gets beaten up by the playground bully.
But, ironically, such prejudice does put Smith Jr in the position of underdog, and he does just enough as an actor (and an athlete) to score a technical victory. It's also difficult to root for Jaden "son of Will" Smith as a 12-year-old underdog when you know in real life he's one of the most privileged kids on the planet. But the relocation does at least inject an element of cultural engagement into the proceedings. The decision to transpose the tale to modern-day Beijing smacks of marketing strategics (this isn't the land of karate but kung-fu), and it's a very shiny happy China we get here, full of people doing tai-chi and not having their human rights abused. Perhaps they didn't have room on the poster to fit in, "Brought to you by the Hollywood Nepotism Institute and the China National Tourist Office", but it would have been a more accurate description of this remake of the 1980s teen touchstone.