Monday's Movie Review: The Karate Kid.

Our Rating *** (3 stars)

As a huge fan of the original Karate Kid I was very much anticipating what Hollywood would pull out of the bag for this remake. How could they ever capture the teen angst and gritty honesty present in the early 80's era of film making, a time also spawning such classics as The Outsiders & Rumblefish - both amazing films that addressed similar subject matter.

Part of the brutal honesty of the original Karate Kid was an underlying tone of racism mixed with cultural superiority and classicist positioning.
The rich white kids get their comeuppance by a poor boy from the hoods under tutelage from a crazy old Jap who steals away their glory and their girls with an epic act of heroic dedication and bravery.

In today's cultural whitewash how would this translate?
Easy. Shifting the location of the film's story to China helps create a separation from the original movie whilst at the same time also points the cultural imperialistic finger away from the American shores and firmly at the Chinese.
Well played Hollywood, well played!

This means that they could maintain the central plot of the main character moving to a new place and being a fish out of water, without having to resort to tactics modern American cinema audiences might find distasteful.

However the modern treatment that this film gets also removes a lot of what was great about the original movie.

Don't get me wrong, we still both quite enjoyed the movie, and Jaden Smith was very convincing in the role, but something wasn't quite right.
Sometimes it is hard to live up to the expectations of one of those quintessential movie moments from your youth.

One of the best things about this movie for me was that I have now seen countless clips from the original whilst writing this review, the funniest I have seen though is this great "Arnold" commentary of the new trailer - he does make some excellent points, like why is Jackie Chan teaching him Kung Fu - the movie is called THE KARATE KID not the Kung Fu Kid!!!! And the Star Wars reference, really???

Even with all of the "problems" this film has, it has still been a box office success, with a global take home of over USD$360 million. It has received a fairly good response from the critics, most noting that it is far from the power and impact of the original.

The original Karate Kid Movie from 1984:

The original Karate Kid still rates it as a classic, and to date has made nearly USD$91 million. It was written by Robert Mark Kamen, starring Ralph Macchio, Pat Morita and Elisabeth Shue, and was a quintessential coming of age movie in the early 80's, a heady heyday for some of today's biggest stars, and the last real era for this kind of movie.

It was a commercial success upon release, and garnered favorable critical acclaim, earning Pat Morita an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

The Karate Kid ranked #31 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies. The film also retains a 90% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 41 reviews.

Unfortunately the film then spurned 3 sequels which got progressively worse.

Worse was still to come, unfortunately in the form of the news that they were developing a modernisation of the story.
This could have gone two ways. Luckily it went the way of a divergent path where there are passing homage's to the original, but if you were to see them back to back they would be their own movies with similarities, rather than a great one, and a poor attempt at copying.

Some of the more memorable moments of the original Karate Kid are touched on but not copied per say, like the famous Wax On Wax Off scene:

and years later, Ralph Macchio still gets reminded about his famous Karate Kid Role - here he is getting ribbed on the latest series of Dancing with the Stars: