- Starring
- Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan, Ben Wang
- Director
- Jonathan Entwistle
- Rating
- PG-13
- Genre
- Action, Drama, Family, Sports
- Release date
- May 30, 2025
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
In Karate Kid: Legends (2025), kung fu prodigy Li Fong relocates from Beijing to New York City with his mother, who forbids him from practicing martial arts after a family tragedy. Struggling to fit in, Li befriends Mia and her father, Victor, a former boxer. When Li attracts the attention of a local karate champion, Connor, he enters a high-stakes karate competition. Guided by his kung fu teacher, Mr. Han, and Daniel LaRusso, Li merges their martial arts styles to prepare for an epic rooftop showdown, overcoming personal challenges and earning respect.
Karate Kid: Legends REVIEW
Legends is an unwieldy golem of Karate Kid clichés and Hollywood tropes stitched together by an AI-generated script, but at least it has fewer attempted sexual assaults by Bugle Boy models than The Next Karate Kid did.
At its core, Karate Kid: Legends is a beat-for-beat rehash of the original film. A single mother and her son relocate thousands of miles away to a new home because she has landed a new job. The Karate Kid meets a girl whose recently dumped ex-boyfriend is also the star pupil of an evil karate sensei whose violent philosophy has twisted the boy into a brutal and sadistic bully. He takes exception to the Karate Kid’s burgeoning relationship with his ex, and the two prepare to fight one another in an inexplicably popular karate tournament. But the only way that Li (the Karate Kid) can win the day is if he masters an “indefensible” trick move.
The real problem with the movie isn’t its reliance on a tired formula. It’s that it’s bursting with clock-eating subplots that leave no time to develop the main story. Not including the final battle, the primary villain appears in a grand total of three non-fight montage scenes, and speaks in only two of them. The secondary villain has (no exaggeration) two lines. Daniel’s inclusion is an afterthought contrivance artificially grafted onto the film to boost trailer views, and Li’s internal conflict (which actually has some interesting potential) is relegated to an emotional speed bump as easily overcome as heartburn.
The performances are mostly adequate, with Sadie Stanley, who plays Li’s love interest Mia, arguably turning in the weakest. Stanley is a relative newcomer whose resume is mainly comprised of one-off roles in a handful of never-heard-of TV series. Her inexperience is evident in a clearly uncomfortable and twitchy performance, as her overly animated face struggles to maintain a single expression for more than a millisecond.
Ben Wang, the Karate Kid, is a talented martial artist who probably gave the best performance in Angel Studios’ 2023 film, ‘Sight’. However, he seems unclear about his character’s motivations, which is forgivable as new ones are piled on and old ones change from scene to scene. The twenty-five-year-old Shanghai native does his best to sort through them, but he can’t help but come across as wooden.
The rest of the Legends’ cast perform their duties as props and plot devices, with Dawson Creek’s Joshua Jackson giving the closest thing to a compelling performance in the role with the most wasted potential.
One would think that the film’s saving grace would be its fight scenes. After all, the leads are talented martial artists who don’t need much in the way of camera magic to make them look impressive. However, the fight cinematography consists of uncomfortably close shots and bad angles, with more cuts than a Courtney Love fan.
Overall, The Karate Kid: Legends has a very rushed and hackneyed vibe that evokes a distinctly low-budget 80s feel. It hits all of the emotional beats that you’d expect, though with a left-handed hammer. The production value is decent, and some definite nostalgia points will grab your inner child’s heart (assuming that you’re a middle-aged fan of the original), but don’t go in hoping for the magic of the original, the fun of Part II, or the dynamism of the first couple of seasons of Cobra Kai.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
I had written up this mini review of the movie before James wrote his first comments about the movie, which I saw last night. I’ll share it:
Karate Kid: Legends is NOT woke. No Marxist, feminist, woke, male-shaming, race-shaming propaganda sprinkled in to broadside you during a happy movie experience. KKL is actually a good, fun movie going-experience like films used to be, back when you can go to a movie and escape the struggles of the real world for 90 minutes. There is a snarky teenage daughter of a new character, a dad who runs a restaurant, however, she is not “woke” and she is kind to Li, the main kid character, ends up falling in love with him (definitely not a woke girl), and she does support her dad and ends up really respecting her dad and helping him out very early into the film. I didn’t see her snark at all as woke, but just a typical city-defensive teen growing in her respect for others.
I want to encourage people to go see the movie and support Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan’s awesome work, so I won’t talk a lot about the story, but the pace of the movie is so fast that when the lights turn on in the theater, I thought only an hour had gone by and hoped for another 1/2 hour! KKL’s pace and the way the story unfolds is very quick and presented in multiple small blocks. The story is accented with some cool comic-like animation at parts to highlight history and to show tournament rules and points in a way that modernizes the film for younger audiences. This is not at all disruptive for us Gen X-ers, though–I saw it as a cool, albeit different than expected accent.
The martial arts scenes are thrilling and there is a bit of nostalgia at the beginning that was heartwarming. However, there were fewer flashbacks to the OG KK than I hoped for, but with the pace of the film and the focus on Li’s life, this makes sense. The new characters are immediately relatable and likeable. Sometimes in a story when new characters are introduced, they are nothing but distractions to the original character parts, but in KKL, I did immediately like the new characters and cheered as their stories unfolded.
Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan, of course, were the scaffolding of the movie that we rush out to the movies to see. They did the fabulous acting jobs we have come to expect from them at this stage of their careers: They embody Daniel and Mr. Han with casualness, wit, warmth, charm, and comedic delivery. They are funny and their martial arts scenes have you on the edge of your seat. However, those awesome moments in the film were fewer for Daniel and Mr. Han letting their own skills rip than expected, but to be fair, those men are now 63 (Macchio) and 71 (Chan) years old, so I appreciate what they did provide for the film and also appreciate, as a martial artist myself at 51, that the older we get, the more of a challenge it is to do those moves without injury or without paying for it in stiffness and soreness for days later.
A surprise and unexpected appearance at the end delivered some off the cuff laughs at the end, ending the film on a high, feel-good, nostalgic note. I actually laughed out loud at the humor!
Overall, KKL was totally worth it, awesome, and fun. I’ll give it a 5 Star for the acting, martial arts, and overall good story, however, I was more inclined to give it 4 Stars only because the pace felt rushed and there was plenty of room for showing more of Li’s training with Daniel and Mr. Han and more room for flashbacks to KK OG. Either way, if you want a fun, wholesome family-centered martial arts movie with a little nostalgia, good story line, no woke poison, relatable characters, and lots of action, see KKL!
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