The Karate Kid Part III (1989) – Review

Just how much mileage can you get out of a young Karate student and his bond with this aging mentor? Well, if you’re John G. Avilden, the answer is probably not as much as you’d think because by the time the third Karate Kid came around, it became somewhat obvious that the franchise was starting to punch a little wide. The first film made sense as it played like a teen version of Avilden’s own Rocky and even came complete with a tight, almost father/son bond that mirrored the relationship that formed between Balboa and his impossibly grizzled teacher, Micky. By Daniel LaRusso’s second adventure, the stakes were raised substantially with a trip to Okinawa as the kid managed to stumble into – and then diffuse a decades old blood feud that was plaguing his old teacher which attempted to deepen their relationship.
However, when the third film came around, things had started to get a little strange and the franchise seemed poised to launch itself over the shark like a flying kick to the solar plexus. Prepare to enter the confusingly strange world of The Karate Kid Part III.

Upon arriving back in America after their stay in Okinawa, both Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi are stunned to find out that the South Seas apartment complex has been sold and demolished leaving the former homeless and the latter jobless. Quite why Daniel’s mother didn’t think to inform them this had happened before sodding off to care for a sick uncle back in New Jersey is unclear, but the fact she’s totally cool for her son to now live full time with the former caretaker of her building is probably a staggering indictment of 80s parenting. Weirder yet, Daniel has decided to not go to college and instead, sinks his college fund into realising Mr. Miyagi’s dream of opening a bonsai tree shop and the two become business partners after they find a place to set up shop.
Anyway, while all this confounding bullshit is going on, even more unfeasible stuff is going down when we find that lunatic Cobra Kai founder, John Kreese is destitute and broke, but in a last ditch attempt to get revenge on those who have wronged him, he looks in on his old war buddy, Terry Silver, who is an extraordinarily wealthy man who’s made his fortune as a toxic-chemical magnate. Shockingly, this extraordinarily busy business man has absolutely no qualms about instantly dropping everything on a whim and focusing all his energies on getting revenge on an old man and a kid for making his abusive war buddy look bad and I can only assume that the reason for this was that 80s cocaine was the absolute tits.
Setting up Mike Barnes, the so-called “bad boy of Karate”, to face LaRusso at this year’s All-Valley Tournament, Silver gradually manages to force Daniel and Miyagi apart while installing himself as the kid’s new mentor, but Terry’s far more violent methods of teaching threaten to undo everything that Daniel-san has learned.
You see? Absolutely mental.

In 1990, John G. Avilden returned to the Rocky saga for the first time since the original to direct Rocky V, a movie that somehow thought it could steer the franchise back to reality after the bombastic fourth installment. However, as it attempted to do that with one of the most outlandish and strangely plotted stories ever written for a sports movie, it only managed to succeed in burying the franchise for an incredible sixteen years. However, we shouldn’t have been that surprised, because Avilden managed to pull off a similar trick about a year before with The Karate Kid Part III, a film that has possibly one of the weirdest fucking plots for a movie that’s basically about a bunch of maniacs forcing a kid to fight in a tournament. Practically nothing in the movie makes the least bit of sense and to plainly list them genuinely makes you seem like a legitimate crazy person – so let’s do just that. Considering that the entire trilogy is supposed to take place over the span of a year, Ralph Macchio was an impressive 27 years old at this point – amusingly a few months older than Thomas Ian Griffith who plays the ludicrously unhinged Terry Silver – and yet he’s starting to get that weird, unsettling look that he’s trapped halfway between looking like a child but acting like a full grown man that gives of mild, uncanny valley vibes. On top of that, the movie has him bond with a teen local pottery maker, but never pulls the trigger with an actual romance because Macchio allegedly (and wisely) didn’t want to have an on-screen romance with an actress who was 16 at the time – but while the actor’s common sense must be lauded, it also means that the movie sets up a romance angle that instantly goes nowhere but friends-ville which just quite weird considering the character has been quite the ladies man in the past. Similarly, the fact that LaRusso is now not only Mr. Miyagi’s housemate, but also his business partner makes you wonder how any of this is supposed to appeal to kids who came to watch Karate and not and entire subplot about two guys struggling to get a bonsai tree store off the ground.

I’m not too sure why the movie has to include so much rock climbing either, as The Karate Kid Part III confoundingly choses omit putting Daniel through the actual tournament in favour of having him defend his title in a single match (rather unfair, no?) which frees up far more room for the planting of bonsai trees. Again, the fans of Karate must have been feeling profoundly ripped off.
However, business picks up when the film serves possibly one of the most baffling and nonsensical revenge plots in cinema history as an obviously coked-up Silver vows to crush a boy and an old man he’s never met in order to get his buddy his business back. Original villain, John Kreese doesn’t even stick around that long as Silver ships him off to Tahiti for a vacation while trying to turn LaRusso to the dark side and the whole thing, while utterly ridiculous, ends up being unintentionally hilarious and kind of salvaged the whole film with how hypnotically stupid it all is. Why the Hell are these grown men convinced they can jump start a new dojo chain from having their chosen fighter (who’s already been taught Karate before they’ve met him) by beating up a teenager in a single match? It may not make a lot of sense (80s cocaine was the good shit, apparently), but Griffiths and a returning Martin Kove make the most of it by overacting wildly, smugly leering like cartoon villains and laughing hysterically like they’re about to launch an attack on Adam West’s Gotham City. It’s awful, but it sure as hell kept me entertained.

While it’s possibly the most watchable Karate Kid, it’s also for all the wrong reasons and once again I have to applaud the writers of Cobra Kai for retroactively making all this shit somehow make sense decades later because if I’d seen this movie before I watched the show, I’d have denounced The Karate Kid Part III as on of the worst sports movies I’ve ever seen. Pat Morita still brings the dignity despite a shocking bad fight double and Macchio looks genuinely terrified despite being a full ten years too old to be in child’s fighting tournament – but it’s the unhinged plot and cackling villains that kept me fully entertained; and not for the right reasons.
You’re going down, LaRusso.
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