The Plot. If you have seen the original Karate Kid, this is the same, only the kid is black, 12 years old and the whole thing is set in China.
If you have not seen the 1984 version - The story is of a kid who gets bullied at school by some martial art wielding bullies and is saved by an asian maintenance guy. The guy ends up training the kid for a big marital arts tournament in order to win the respect of the bullies.
General thoughts. As I said, the movie is set in China. Beijing mostly, but for some reason they did some training in the Great Wall of China. I don't know why, the thing is quite far from Beijing. I guess one point of the movie was to show the world that China is not that bad of a place. They showed the Forbidden City, some kind of a fancy temple on top of a mountain and some other stuff.
I don't know why they named the movie Karate kid. They don't do much of Karate in China. The whole movie is build around Kung Fu instead. Pretty much the same thing, but the name sort of makes a difference. Why call it the Karate Kid, if it didn't have Karate in it?
I think one of the reasons for this to be set in China, not in Japan, is because they just had to get Jackie Chan to do this, but he's Chinese. Come to think of it, how many car factory workers moved to China once the production was moved there? Was it really cheaper to move to China then find another job? I guess it is. That's how little Dre got there.
I wish they at least would've come up with a separate story for this movie. The final tournament is exactly the same, with the leg injury by the half finalist, who Happens to be in the same team as the main bad guy, who is supposed to meet the hero in the final round. The tournament was the same, but luckily the moves were a bit different. I swear, if I would've seen him do the Crow technique, I'd have stopped watching it.
I also noticed some cut-backs. The master taught the student using only one 'weird exercise' instead of the three different ones used in the original. There was the car connection with the master, but instead of having 4 antique cars laying around in the back yard, he had only one, in the middle of his living room and not even an antique. And of course, the movie was shot in China, which must be a lot cheaper than doing it in, let's say, Japan or the US.
On the bright side, the first big role for Jaden Smith was a real good one. I think the lad did a really great job. Maybe a little too much showing off, but the parts that matter were good. Also, he is really his father's child when it comes to his facial characteristics. And attitude. Let's just hope that his career won't end where it started, like for Ralph Macchio, with Karate Kid.
All in all, this movie would be great for someone who has not seen or heard about the first movie. For anybody else, this just feels like a complete and utter rip-off. It's great entertainment and a nice family movie with a happy ending. Just what you'd expect from this type of movie.
5/10 Flogs
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