The Karate Kid (2010) – Review

80s fashions, nutzoid Vietnam vets, weird cultural appropriation, Joe Esposito’s “You’re The Best” blaring on the soundtrack – for a lot of people, The Karate Kid is a touchstone of its decade, playing like Rocky for teens while the movie hyped up the glorious past time of watching children kick each other in the face. It’s about as unapologetically 1980s as it comes and if I’m being honest, after a string of weird and strangely malformed sequels (III in particular is impressively out of its gourd), the franchise has never really energised me in the way it has some of my peers.
To put it bluntly, I wasn’t interested back in the 80s and, until the mercilessly addictive Cobra Kai legacy series came along, I wasn’t particularly bothered as an adult. But in an attempt to broach the gulf between generations, we got a 2010 remake that didn’t palm a 22 year old as its titular kid – however, technically he didn’t learn Karate either, but we’ll get into that later. Anyway, with the power of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith at his back, it was time for Jaden Smith to become the next teen to discover that learning martial arts is a perfect replacement for bad parenting.

12 year old Dre Parker isn’t having the best time of it. After his widowed mother, Sherry, has scored a job transfer that narrowly kept her from bring out of work, it’s meant that both have had to move from Detroit to Bejing which proves to be traumatic far beyond the 13 hour flight. For a start, Dre doesn’t know his way around and worse yet, he hasn’t really learnt any of the language either, so the culture shock has hit him pretty damn hard – however, it doesn’t hit him quite as hard as Cheng: a bully who is worrying fluent in Kung Fu and enjoys using it to throw his weight around.
While Dre sparks up a friendship with violin prodigy, Meiying, his frequent beatings and humiliations cause him to suffer at school and at home as he impotently rages at his situation, but just when it looks like he’s going to receive the mother of all ass-whuppins, he’s saved by an unlikely protector: Mr Han, the broken down, withdrawn maintenance man of his building. It seems that the old dude is something of a martial arts whizz (even though it was children he was bearting up like Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld) and a desperate Dre manages to convince him to help him defend himself against any further retaliation.
The good news is that Han says yes, the bad news is that in order to convince Cheng’s tyrannical fighting teacher to call off the dogs, Han enters Dre into a martial arts tournament in order to settle the beef once and for all. From here it’s standard Karate Kid stuff – even though no Karate is even remotely involved (they’re not even in the correct country) – and the weird, passive aggressive stealth training gets underway with obsessive jacket hanging taling the place of endless car buffing. As Dre starts to learn, he and Han bond as the latter’s tragic past comes to light, but when the tournament arrives and everyone’s Kung Fu fighting, can Dre beat his bully at his own game?

So let’s start by addressing the gargantuan, crane kicking elephant in the room – at no point anywhere in this Karate Kid remake does anyone – and I do mean anyone – do a single move of Karate. For a start, Karate comes from Japan and as this movie takes place in China, Kung Fu is the preferred martial art used here. Now, why this movie simply didn’t just call itself The Kung Fu Kid, I will never know; I mean, it’s not like we wouldn’t have figured it out and technically speaking it would be like setting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake in Arkansas or having the redo of The Magnificent Seven feature nine heroes. Anyway, if you can manage to push past the glaring error that is the film’s very title, we also find that The Karate Kid falls into many of the common traps that afflicted almost all of that wave of decades that assaulted us in the 00s and 10s and the main one is that for a teen drama/sports movie, the remake overcomplicates a very simple story to an impressive degree.
Sitting at an admittedly overlong 2 hours and 20 minutes, director Harald Zwart seems dead set not to allow even a single smidge of 80s cheese to his reimagining and instead deploys a fair amount of modern day schmaltz to fill out every moment when someone isn’t throwing a twirling spin kick. As a result, we may get a set up that makes a fair amount of sense, but it also means that Dre doesn’t even start training until about an hour has already elapsed.

However, while those suspicious of remakes do have some of their fears realised and the film either tumbles down a few racial rabbit holes, not even the curious, painfully on the nose sight of Jaden Smith training on top of a strangely deserted Great Wall Of China manages to dull the good points. For a start, Kung Fu turns out to be a far more a cinematic fighting style than than Karate and while the introduction of some subtle wire work may confuse fans of realism, it doesn’t half kick the final half hour into fifth gear as our combatants twirl, spin and beat each other silly while we cheer them on. Also, it allows for some pretty stunning training that riffs on the brutal regimes laid out by classic Kung Fu movies, but best of all, it allows Jackie Chan to turn in a deceptively moving dramatic role that not only matches the work of Pat Morita’s original, but has the added benefit that you don’t have to switch to a stuntman in a bald cap when the star of Police Story has to do some of the rough stuff. However, it seems that the true testing point of The Karate Kid redux is whether you’re on board with the idea of cramming Jaden Smith down our throats as a bankable movie star. Of course, with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s names in the credits as producers, it’s easy to level the nepo-baby charge at the young actor; but on the other hand, why would you feel the need to take pot shots at an 11 year old child when he’s only doing the best he can. In his defence, he does everything required – his performance is strong, his martial arts abilities are believable and Dre Parker proves to be marginally less of a compulsive whiner than Daniel LaRusso was at his most entitled. Is the finished film as iconic as the original? Of course not – The Karate Kid falls in that niche of 80s family movies that’s always been treated with rose tinted glasses, but while the 2010 version overeggs the pudding by a good thirty minutes or so, there’s a much cleaner sense of resolution that doesn’t have to be cleared up by running over into the first ten minutes of a sequel.

Seemingly doing itself no favours by initially awarding itself a staggeringly inaccurate title and demanding that we instantly take Smith seriously as an actor because his parents said so, The “Karate” Kid actually manages to be far better than you thought thanks to some zippy fight sequences and Chan’s touching performance. It may not be the best around (to quote Esposito again), the existence of Cobra Kai may have made it all but obsolete and having Chan yell “jacket off” to a child may be accidently awkward, but it’s nowhere near the TKO some would have you believe.
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