The Karate Kid (1984) – Review

It had to happen sooner or later…
There comes a time when every diligent movie blogger finds when they’ve no choice but to have to sit down and try and bang up a whole bunch of paragraphs about a famous movie that somehow never really appealed to them despite it being a cornerstone of a lot of people’s childhoods.
I have nothing particularly against The Karate Kid as a movie, but back in the day it completely flew under my radar as back in 1984 I was way more obsessed with Jaws sequels and Star Wars than I was about a runtish seventeen year-old getting round-house kicked by Californian bullies and as the years slipped by, my intrest in the misadventures of Daniel LaRusso hardly rose to prominence in my eyes. I mean, why would it when I had No Retreat, No Surrender; Best Of The Best and other shonky cinematic martial arts tournaments to keep me happy.
However, thanks to the magnificent and meteoric rise of legacy sequel series, Cobra Kai, I decided it was time to strike hard, strike first and deliver no mercy to find out if The Karate Kid actually is the best around.

Young Daniel LaRusso is hardly thrilled about his mother’s decision to up sticks from New Jersey and move them to Los Angeles, but the cloud seems to have a perky silver lining when he meets rich girl cheerleader Ali Mills at a beach party. However, that cloud moves back in again in the shape of Johnny Lawrence and his gang of whooping buddies who hail from the agressive Cobra Kai, a Karate dojo run with an iron fist by the vaguely deranged ex-special forces veteran John Kreese and the group decide to select hapless Daniel for regular ass-whuppings.
Racking up black eyes and bruises like it’s a sport, LaRusso finds salvation in the gentle, unassuming Mr. Miyagi, his building’s handyman who is an immigrant from Okinawa who knows a thing or two about Karate.
Before you know it, Miyagi has walked Daniel into Cobra Kai and offered a challenge: Kreese’s thugs leaves Daniel alone for two months and Daniel faces the dojo in the ring at the upcoming Under-18 All-Valley Karate Championship. However, while that means LaRusso finally has some breathing room, he now only has a very short amount of time to get fighting fit to face Johnny Lawrence and his cohorts, but Mr. Miyagi claims that everything will OK as he starts Daniel-san on a rather unorthodox training regime.
However, while Daniel us hoping to be taught the finer points of punching and kicking, Miyagi has him waxing his car, painting fences and sanding wood and soon our paniking hero is worried he’s destined for yet another humiliating beat down. However, the savvy old man has a few tricks up his sleeve and as the two bond, it turns out Miyagi’s under the radar training might actually pay off when the fateful day comes when Daniel gets to legally kick his tormentors in the face.

As I mentioned earlier, I was never particularly drawn into the teen drama/competitive martial arts world of The Karate Kid until I plonked myself down in front of revelatory experience that was Cobra Kai that had no issues addressing my main issue with the original movie and turning it into an actual plot point. Simply put, one of the smartest moves modern culture ever made was the show leaning fulling into the fact that Daniel LaRusso really was something of an entitled, whiny lil’ bitch and while you can’t entirely put that on the shoulders on Ralph Macchio (he didn’t write the script, after all), there’s something about the preening little shit – LaRusso, not Macchio – that makes it perfectly understandable why the thugs from Cobra Kai felt the need to throw their weight around. OK, I’m not condoning bullying and I’m not one of those Karate Kid revisionists that somehow believes that Johnny Lawrence is completely blameless – the man is plainly a prick (Lawrence, not William Zabka), but while Cobra Kai did totally fire a thoroughly unnecessary first shot – and probably the second and third – LaRusso does kind of treat Elisabeth Shue’s love interest like dirt a lot of the time and he stomps around the place with major main character syndrome; which is only made worse by the fact that he actually is the main character.
While I’m waxing lyrical about waxing on and waxing off, while it’s impressive that the 80s still had enough love and care for building character and plot in a family film, the fact that we don’t even realise that Mr. Miyagi’s has already started Daniel’s training until well over an hour has gone suggests that maybe the film could use a bit of a boost in pace. However, while the sound of a deliberate pace and a whiny lead may have you wondering just how the film went on to become to Karate dojos what Top Gun was to aviator shades. Well, that’s actually quite easy to answer, because everything else about the movie is pretty damn sweet.

It’s the array of supporting characters that ultimately makes the film as memorable as it is – from Shue’s uber-supportive love interest to Martin Kove’s effortlessly hissable Kreese, everyone orbiting Daniel LaRusso’s annoying star is practically perfectly pitched and played. However, the cream of the crop is undoubtedly Pat Morita’s diminutive, Yoda-esque Mr. Miyagi who proves to be a magnificently layered creation capable of generating great sympathy (his drunken admission that his wife died during childbirth in an interment camp while he fought for America in WWII is a genuine heartbreaker) and unleashing killer one liners at a moments notice. His father figure bond even makes LaRusso tolerable enough for you to completely forgive him for his entitled bullshit when the tournament finally rolls around, although it also quite possible you feel for him because Macchio looks genuinely terrified during the whole ordeal.
Sure, all the wax on, wax off stuff and the posing with the crane kick on the beach is legitimately iconic, but once we get to the finale, the film unloads every trick in the book on you to get you invested – and by fuck does it work.
The moment Joe Esposito’s impossibly uplifting “You’re The Best” kicks in, you’re all in as we head into montage territory as Daniel-san gradually moves through the tournament that bizarrely seems cool with teenagers kicking each other square in the face without even the slightest snifter of protective gear. From Kove’s ever more Machiavellian advice to his acolytes (“Sweep the leg!”) to the final, awesome – although technically illegal – final blow, it all ends on an abrupt high with the feeling that nothing has actually been resolved.

However, while fans had to twist in the wind for some real resolution until the ’86 sequel, there’s a feeling that the world of LaRusso, Johnny Lawrence and John Kreese didn’t really crystalise until 2018 until Cobra Kai held up a nostalgic, but impressively truthful magnifying glass to the series. If you grew up with The Karate Kid, or enjoyed the retconning the later series brought in, feel free to slap on another star. But even with Morita’s fantastic performance and a rousing final act, I can’t help but give Daniel LaRusso about as much mercy as Cobra Kai does.
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