I’ve made no secret of my trepidation with the remake going in and having now seen it I can say that at the very least it didn’t suck as much as I thought it would. But it wasn’t great either.For every thing it does right it does something else wrong and the result is a movie that feels very uneven and ultimately unsatisfying.

The remake follows the general story of the original film very closely. A single mother (Taraji P Henson) is forced to move with her son for her job. Rather than going from New Jersey to California, this time it is Detroit to China. Once the pair arrive in Beijing the boy, Dre (Jaden Smith), makes friends with a girl (Wenwen Han) at his school and just as quickly makes enemies with a group of martial arts thugs. After a series of beatings and humiliations, Dre makes friends with and learns Kung Fu from his building’s maintenance man Mr Han (Jackie Chan) after Han negotiates a cease fire with the bullies’ Master (Rongguang Yu) so that Dre can train to take them on at a kung fu tournament.

Hewing this close to the original story presents a problem. Generally people complain that remakes aren’t enough like the source material but here the issue is that it stayed too close to the source and didn’t do it very well. The moments in the movie that succeeded were by and large the moments that were original and that allowed the characters to find their own voices and do their own thing. The story beats that mirrored the original film ended up feeling rushed and lifeless. It is weird to watch a two and a half movie and feel that it was rushed but there it is.

In interest of full disclosure, I love the original Karate Kid. It is one of my favorite movies of my childhood and is one of the first things that sparked my interest in martial arts. That and ninjas.  So there is definitely an element of judging against the original that is going on here. Obviously going in to it as a fan I am naturally partial to the way the scenes played out in the original and how the characters and actors were handled there. When they stage some scenes with line for line dialogue and those scenes fall flat, it is hard as a fan of the original to tell if those scenes were poorly handled or if nostalgia was just having its way with me.

So when I say that while Rongguang Yu turns in a good performance as Master Li and is a very convincing as an arrogant douchebag (and also looks like a Chinese Kyle MacLachlan) but lacks the bat shit crazy menace of Matrin Kove’s Kreese, or that Zhenwei Wang’s performance as lead bully Cheng is absolutely a badass and also a huge dick, but doesn’t provide the same level of gleeful mockery and unhinged delight that William Zabka’s main baddie Johnny did, or that this movie’s proxy move for the Crane technique was hella lame, I may be measuring the movie unfairly. So with that in mind, I want to put those issues aside and look at the movie without comparison to the original. Sadly, even without comparison, the movie ultimately fails.

There are a few things the film does very, very well. It looks completely gorgeous. The cinematography is absolutely fantastic and Beijing is used to great effect. The director calls for sweeping crane shots and breathtaking angles that make everything look awesome. Even shots at school and in the apartment look pretty. A resume that includes Pink Panther 2 and One Night at McCool’s does not suggest that director Harald Zwart would have these kind of shots in him but he has really stepped up his game visually.

The kung fu in the movie is also very good and generally exciting to watch, but that has some issues I will get to later. It is well choreographed and performed and Jaden Smith really shines here. His dance background helped him no doubt but when he moves it is with intention and his techniques have weight behind them. A problem with a lot of movies where a character learns martial arts is that they learn the moves okay and can do the choreography but they are obviously just going through the motions and putting their hands and feet in position. Smith doesn’t do that. He is doing the moves with intention and it shows. This really elevates the fight scenes as they look very authentic. Authentic enough that the few moments of goofy wire work can be forgiven. Jackie Chan get’s a fight and it is really fun to watch. Since it is against 12 year olds he can’t hit them and has to be creative about blocking and disabling. It was a joy to see and I really liked that scene a lot.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned the movie is really uneven. If you asked me at any given scene I would have had a different answer for if I liked it or not.  The beginning moved way too quickly through important beats and lingered on things that were flat. When Dre meets Mr Han and they start training, it picks up as their relationship feels genuine. But the performances between both of them were kind of up and down. Smith handled the light hearted, funny moments very well and he seems to have a natural likeability and charisma. He also has good timing and delivery on jokes and one liners. What he can’t do so well is carry a heavy emotional payload and as a result a lot of the important emotional beats are missed and fall flat. Likewise, Jackie Chan’s early depiction of a sad, broken man seemed to be mostly having a Van Dyke and walking with a pronounced shuffling limp. Chan shines in the training scenes and the scene where you find out why he has been rebuilding a car in his living room is tremendous. Chan’s dramatic acting here is top notch and it is the one scene in the movie that I feel completely trumps the mirror of it in the original movie. The relationship between Dre and Mr Han is the hands down best thing going in the movie and I enjoyed all of those scenes…I just wish that there were more of them and less of just about all of the other scenes in the movie.

Those issues aside, there are two really big problems that would kill the whole thing even it wasn’t uneven. They both kind of relate back to the original but not as much by comparison as much as why one worked and the other didn’t. By that I mean that these things wouldn’t have worked regardless of the existence of the original but the original managed to pull these things off.

The first is the age of the kids involved. Dre, his lady friend and his assailants are all 12. I worried before the film came out that because they were only 12 the stakes couldn’t possibly be that high because what PG movie would be showing 12 year olds brutalizing each other. The answer is this one. Dre gets fucked up left right and center in this movie. The bullies beat him down hard and when the tournament comes around the fights are pretty brutal. This made me very uncomfortable. I don’t really want to see 12 year olds hurting each other so badly. Seeing Dre’s mother cheer him on as he advances through the tournament felt crass and awful when her cheers were for Dre delivering such devastating blows to his opponents. I had a hard time really getting into the fights when it was children doing the fighting. It just felt wrong and I was very uncomforable.

The second is that when it was all said and done, I just didn’t feel anything. In order for this material to work you have to be emotionally invested or it is going to fall flat. This version fell very flat. I think part of the problem was the aforementioned story points that were built to give movie emotional weight and that allow you to invest were rushed through and didn’t deliver their emotional payload which would have earned some of the cheesiness later. The big issue though is that the attempt to raise the stakes by putting Dre in a different country ends up hamstringing the effort. It took me awhile to pin point why it didn’t feel like it had any heart and I think I have got it. In the new film, Dre is going to another country and another culture. It is kind of accepted that there will be an adjustment and he will be a fish out of water as this is all completely different and foreign to him. But the movie doesn’t really show him struggle with that so much outside of Spongebob Squarepants being in Chinese. The only struggle Dre really has is that he is getting picked on by one group of kids. The rest of the time he is having a good time with his ‘girlfriend.’ For Daniel in the original film, he is moving to a new city where things will be different but they aren’t moving to another country or a place where there is a big cultural difference but he is not liked because he is poor and comes from the poor part of town. His struggles are being shunned by pretty much everybody besides the girl he likes and Mr Miyagi. And he is shunned because he is just not considered worthy. It is sort of nebulous why the bullies beat up and continue to pick on Dre. It is stated that Cheng is a family friend of the girl and therefore has some vested interest in her doing well at the violin and the main altercation starts when Dre intervenes as Cheng is being a dick to her about it. In the original Johnny is Ali’s abusive ex-boyfriend and wants to get back together with her and sees Daniel as an obstacle. When Meiying’s parents don’t want her hanging out with Dre anymore it is because he is making her late for things and is a bad influence, almost costing her a scholarship. Fair enough, right? That is just good parenting. In the original, Ali’s parents don’t want her seeing Daniel because he is not worthy of her. Daniel is shunned by just about everybody for where he comes from and the class he is. When he fights in the tournament he isn’t just fighting to get the bullies to knock it off, he is fighting for respect and worthiness. The remake seems to be reaching for this near the end but they just flat haven’t earned it. The result is that the remake doesn’t carry the proper emotional weight to the central conflict and it suffers greatly for it.

I think at the end of the day the biggest issue here is that it shouldn’t have been the Karate Kid in the first place. Had they called it the Kung Fu Kid and then paid homage to the Karate Kid throughout the movie but gone its own way I think the film would have been successful. If they hadn’t tried to shoehorn the changes into the classic story so that they could utilize the brand recognition they would have been able to find their own way and provided a film that could breathe on its own and find its own footing. There are a lot of good ideas here but those are confined to the original film’s story and end up going nowhere.

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

I didn’t hate the new Karate Kid but I obviously can’t say I liked it much either. I suspect that for kids watching this for the first time having never seen the original it will be awesome and will most likely get them interested in martial arts. This is a good thing. However, for anyone else looking for a good movie there is not one to be found here. If you are going to see Jaden Smith be cute and deliver one-liners and eventually do some good kung fu then you will not be disappointed. If you are looking for a well written story and great performances then you have most assuredly come to the wrong place. With the brutality of the fights between 12 year olds and the uneven quality of the film I cannot recommend the movie but there are worse ways of spending two and a half hours at the theater. Of course there are much better ways too so this one is best avoided.