Karate Kid
The retrospective mania with the 80s does not limit itself to the comeback of shoulderpads in women’s clothes and big hairdos, it also extends itself to films and we are, these days, firmly in the grip of either comebacks (as in the case of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or some of the 80s action icons who are thrown together in The Expendables) or remakes of which Karate Kid is one.
The original, in 1984, was a turning of age movie filmed by the same director who turned Rocky into an acclaimed, award-winning film and the remake, filmed by Dutch director Harald Zwart was bound to struggle to get out of its predecessor’s shadow.
We live, I’d like to think, in slightly more enlightened times when cultural differences do not result in discrimination which has to be sorted out through physical combat. This is something Zwart gets and his take on Karate Kid is a culture where suddenly martial arts become the vehicle through which our protagonist, ably performed by Jaden Smith, will find the means to overcome his own sense of fear and find acceptance amongst his peers.
The ‘master’ in this tale is none other than real-life martial arts films action-star, Jackie Chan, who manages to tone down his usually wacky sense of humour and deliver a performance which allows restraint and sentiment to shine through.
Those who know me are aware that I have been practising martial arts for over five years so the physical part of the flick finds a resonance with me which I have to work hard to overcome in order to give you a balanced assessment. The thing is that the entire film exists for those all-defining action sequences where we will find out whether Jaden’s character, Dre, will make it through or not. This makes all the intervening sequences where Dre (a black kid in China in this case) struggles with cultural and language barriers and tries to find his inner man (so to speak) appear a little slow and a little contrived with the saving grace of the interaction between Jaden and Jackie which, indeed, appears to have raised the bar in the master-student stereotype.
As expected of a remake this one follows in the well-trod footsteps of its predecessor, has upgraded some aspects in terms of setting and action sequences (when Jackie fights on screen he is pure magic and Dre's character actually has proper moves to perform) and has managed to deliver a film which hits all the right notes, does not fall below the standard set by the original and actually manages to improve on it a little and deliver enough thrills and spills to leave the viewer feeling good about themselves.
