Karate Kid: Legends review: The latest movie in the franchise is a good time despite being kind of bad

We’ve all had those conversations with family and friends where you share how much you just loved something you watched, but then you lean in a little closer and maybe drop to a whisper, “but it’s actually kind of bad”.

Karate Kid: Legends sits at this intersection of something that effectively taps into the nostalgia of the franchise, evokes the warm-and-fuzzies, serves up an enjoyable experience, even if you know that it’s not a great movie.

How much do you forgive of movie sins such as shallow characterisations, a lightweight script and structural issues? If you had a good time, does any of that matter?

Or are we just a sucker for something, anything, that makes us feel like a kid again, transported back to a time when we didn’t worry so much about thematic coherence and complex, sometimes contradictory, emotions?

We just wanted to see a bully get kicked in the face. We didn’t want to have to feel sorry for the bully at the same time.

Karate Kid: Legends does exactly this. It’s elemental, not elevated, but it mostly delivers a good time.

As the sixth film in the franchise, Karate Kid: Legends marries together two strands of the canon by bringing the 2010 reboot with Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith into the main continuity so that it exists in the same universe as the four Pat Morita movies and the sequel series Cobra Kai.

For the first time in the franchise’s history, the titular kid is actually Asian, but he’s Chinese, not Japanese. Li Fong (Ben Wang) lives in Beijing with his mum, Dr Fong (Ming-Na Wen), and is a student of kung fu master Mr Han (Chan), who happens to be his uncle.

Li had promised his mother he wouldn’t fight anymore after the recent death of his brother, an experienced martial arts champion, but sneaks off to Mr Han’s school anyway. For a fresh start, Dr Fong moves relocates the two of them to New York City, where she has a new job.

His first night in his new city, Li meets Mia (Sadie Stanley) at her father Victor’s (Joshua Jackson) neighbourhood pizza joint. The two are sweet on each other, but there’s an aggressive ex-boyfriend, Conor (Aramis Knight), who also happens to be the reigning champion of the Five Boroughs Tournament.

You can see where this is going. There’s a bully, that bully has an even worse adult bully egging him on, a competition to settle the score, and lots and lots of training montages. You’ve seen this all before but the familiarity of The Karate Kid is the point.

This is a movie that is mostly broad strokes and not a lot of detail or depth. The story is so thin, that it’s actually two movies smashed together and the runtime is still only 94 minutes. They’re really padding here.

The first half involves Li training Victor up for a boxing match, and then Jackson mostly disappears from the film to make way for the second movie, which is Li preparing to face off against Conor with the help of Mr Han and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio).

A word of warning, Macchio doesn’t even show up until well into the second half, so you have to be patient.

There’s a lot of talk about Mr Han’s kung fu and Mr Miyagi’s karate being two branches of the same tree, but the metaphor (and the history of the two martial arts) doesn’t go deeper than that.

The first Karate Kid became a classic for many reasons but one of them is that it balanced Daniel’s coming-of-age journey with the emotional story of Mr Miyagi’s past as a Japanese immigrant in America during WWII, and the loss he has experienced.

It grounded the story in history, and reflected the California-born Morita’s own experiences in an internment camp during the war.

Karate Kid: Legends dips into Li’s PTSD from having witnessed his brother’s death, but it’s only shallow. The surface is where this movie is most comfortable, especially when it comes to Conor, an interchangeable antagonist who will never match Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka shows up here in a cameo at the end).

But there is so much latent goodwill for The Karate Kid that if you’ve seen even half the movies and maybe a season or two of Cobra Kai, and you bring that assumed knowledge with you, it goes a long way in filling in a lot of blank spaces.

Then, you can read more into scenes and beats that don’t have much going on. This movie alone doesn’t make clear why Daniel LaRusso is a big deal, you have to already know it.

We all know about so bad it’s good. Karate Kid: Legends is good despite being kind of bad.

Rating: 3/5

Karate Kid: Legends is in cinemas on June 5