Review of the series of films of the genre "Karate Kid" from Uran

04.09.2016uranium

Every self-respecting reviewer once has a moment when he must review films in his genre that he does not like, such a moment has come for me - today I present to the readers my opinion about a series of films of the genre "Karate Kid"(not only the original series, but also clones and remakes): about children who got into martial arts in order to protect themselves from the horrors of the school and yard hierarchy. Honestly, I never really liked it because of the vigorous amount of illogicality and negative cliches from childhood. But the time of this very childhood has passed and it’s time to evaluate this subgenre of A and B category action films with an adult eye.

First, let's go through the cliches and characteristics of this movie:

1. The main character is a schoolboy aged from 8 to 17 years old, and remains so by the end of the film - this distinguishes the subgenre from other action films, where the child grows into an adult bully like Alexei Serebryakov (Fan), Van Damme (Bloodsport) or Mount Vardanyan (Eclipse Day), his opponents are also shkolota. The lower the quality of the film, the more the hero behaves like a complete loser, causing his palm to hit the viewer's face.
2. The plot outline is basically the same - this very main character, for an often far-fetched reason, comes from a city where everyone respects him to a sharply different one (usually a slum town, less often, as in “Never Give Up” - to a major town). Soon, the hero encounters a local alpha, who begins to brutally knead him, using techniques that in reality send him, if not to intensive care, then to the emergency room. The worse the film, the harsher the beating will be - it will take place in front of a crowd of people, in the school yard in full view of the director - but no one will intervene, the hero’s mother will not come to school with a showdown, no one will report to the cops. He ALWAYS intervenes in the situation a girl who always goes with this alpha guy, but sympathizes with the hero, for which he gets more, more, more and more. At some point, the hero will be harnessed by a local janitor/homeless person/locksmith, who knows about martial arts and begins to teach the hero. By the end of the film, the hero believes in himself and defeats the villain at a small-town/underground tournament, leaving with the girl into the sunset to heroic music.
3. In 90% of cases, everyone around the hero in the new city behaves like complete degenerates, the main one of whom is the coach of the main villain, himself the same alpha guy, but aged. This is certainly a former shell-shocked warrior who has a large pretentious dojo, in which he trains children with harsh methods: in sparring, children fight until half to death, the trainer constantly beats them and drills them in the “army” way and cranberry cultivates in them anger and hatred for everything living and weak . In reality, this also happened that the teacher in the section trains either with super-harsh methods or prepares a gang of thugs from them - there were criminal cases of this kind, but in the movies it was shown in a very exaggerated way - it was for children. At the same time, no one puts the coach in his place (except for the plot), there are no lines of parents asking “why does my son come home from the gym all broken?” everyone is happy and happy.
   When you try to talk normally with this coach, he publicly sends the hero and his teacher a bad name and, moreover, threatens to continue pursuing and beating the guy. Instead of going to the police later, the hero’s teacher offers the following solution to the problem...
4. Tournament - it is almost always present in one form or another, often official, less often underground. There, the hero is forced, with the frightened face of a complete loser, to one by one defeat the gopota one by one. The penultimate boss will certainly injure him at the insistence of the villain trainer, but the hero will still be able to cope with the final boss with the help of a super blow, sometimes unrelated to the technique being trained.
5. The training montage often looks very, very implausible - an elderly sensei, instead of teaching serious techniques and developing strikes, teaches a boy to sweep the coach's yard for free, paint fences, polish cars (this will be useful to you in reality, yes. When you get kicked out of school for poor performance due to constant absenteeism due to systematic beatings) and drop and pick up your jacket from the floor 500 times (this skill will come in handy when the gopniks rip your jacket off and cough it up, dancing on it) - that is, everything that a real loser should be able to do, but nothing not a fighter. But before the viewer has time to bring his hand to his face, it suddenly turns out that the movements in the process of these actions TURN OUT to be karate blows! And now the kid, after a hundred polished cars, suddenly knows how to install a block and carry out reverse gears. Sometimes, of course, there are differences, but even there the training is far from correct - there is almost no sparring, use of windings, gloves, caps, etc. Meanwhile, the villains train in full-contact sparring with a bunch of strikes and super-strikes in gyms stuffed with modern technical means, comforts and 100% discipline, not knowing that this will not help them.
6. The sensei himself has a sad past - his family/children/teacher died, sometimes through the sensei’s fault. The guy helps him cope with this past - and this is a rare plus of such films. Also, the sensei is often invincible and can cope with an entire army of gopots in one wicket. What prevents him from breaking the arms and legs of the main villains so that they never harm civilians again is not the police, but the Sensei’s PRINCIPLES of non-violence - yes, the same ones that allow him to watch his store being destroyed from film to film .
7. There will certainly be a ball at which the hero dares to invite the heroine to dance, the main villain will appear there and, the worse the film, the closer the brawl will be in location to the ball itself
8. And the most important cliche and question that torments all viewers - WHERE IS THE POLICE?! After what the villains say and do (well, they break the hero’s nose and ribs, destroy the sensei’s shop/dojo, threaten him publicly with death and constant persecution, while being grown men), even the more adequate friends of the main character do not call the police. In later films, the creators took the criticism into account - the police appear... Offscreen to tell the hero that this is all (even the shoplifting) is unimportant bullshit. Or, when asked to call her, the beaten man refuses, saying that he “fell down the stairs 15 times on his face.”

According to the logic of the film, if the police are not functioning, nothing prevents the hero from meeting a gopnik in a dark alley and hitting him on the top of the head with a pipe or stabbing him with a knife. But this is a children's movie, you can't do that. Yes, yes, just like in the Batman universe, you cannot kill criminals.

They will notice to me - but this is an American movie, in the action films with the Van Dammes it was similar, to which I will answer - all these films are aimed at teaching teenagers how to act in real life and in all of them there are smart thoughts that, alas, drown in these cliches, because of which they look stupid and illogical, spoiling the cinematic simulation of a real problem.

Now that all the cliches have been announced, we move on to the films themselves.

"Karate Kid" (Karate-Kid, 1984)

Theoretically, this film is the founder of the subgenre, but practically, similar films (the sucker gets to the sensei) have happened many times before, and if you know about them, then tell us in the comments. According to the plot, the guy Daniel (Ralph Macchio) moves with his mother to a new city - his mother found a good job there. The hero meets Ellie (Elisabeth Shue) at a new school, but her ex-boyfriend, karateka Johnny (William Zabka), is jealous and beats Johnny, after which he begins to bully him at school. Danny does not give up and tries to fight back, which is pointless - Johnny is a karate champion and the best student of the shell-shocked warrior-trainer Kreese (Martin Kove). After one of the fights, he is saved by his neighbor, plumber Miyagi (Pat Morita), also a former Japanese soldier (who fought for the United States) and teaches the guy karate. What happened next - you know.

Despite the fact that most of the above-mentioned clichés are used in the film, it is with surprise to the reader that I say - this is a good and watchable film. Why?

• Many cliches are competently smoothed out by the screenwriters and the director of the film, John Avidsen, who directed the legendary “Rocky” (hence the guy with Italian roots + the main character’s sometimes strange training):
  1. The guy suddenly learned to fight well? He knew how to do karate from the very beginning, as he himself talks about in the film, and even stands up to a smaller gopot - one can say that Miyagi only refined (albeit in a strange way) his technique and forced him to believe in himself, which led to victory.
  2. Strange preparation and elaborate blow of the Crane from Wushu? I completely agree about the training, but this can be partially attributed to the fact that Miyagi prepared the boy not for real fights, but for competitions (which will be clearly stated in the second part), where the Crane Kick relatively logically helped to deliver a point blow to the final boss.
  3. At the first meeting, Johnny does not beat the hero much. Beatings do not take place in front of the entire school, and the time when Danny was beaten near the fence (by the way, Ralph Macchio missed in that scene at full strength and was injured), he provoked it himself. True, this is outweighed by the scene with the bicycle, where the boy could very well have died.
• Good acting. First of all, I will note Pat Morita, who played a wise and seasoned master with his own almost revealed drama with humor and calm; next comes Ralph Macchio: his Daniel IN THIS part seems not such a sucker as in the sequels, sometimes he can stand up for himself and is quite smart. The impression intensifies when you find out Macchio’s age - at the time of filming he was 22 years old! In response, one can recall the cliche “25-year-old men as children,” but here he fits in like a glove. The rest of the actors also don’t spoil the picture, even the born villain Martin Kove, who played Kreese too cranberry-like.
• Not bad music
• The plot is smooth, even if the film is long (2 hours long). It is not very boring and the time spent developing the characters is used wisely.
• Fights. Honestly, they are not standard. However, it was filmed watchably, without unnecessary fuss and sometimes with long takes. The blows are shown beautifully; you can see who hit where and how far away they were, the heroes are writhing in pain, getting knocked down after the first serve.
• Problems considered. Teachers who train their students to become idiots using super-cruel methods are also present in reality; there is a conversation about childhood cruelty, first love and self-confidence

The bottom line is this - a good, smooth sports melodrama, a kind of “Rocky for children” without the nonsense with a bunch of smart thoughts and subtexts. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned clichés, although smoothed out, spoil the picture slightly and will still be difficult for non-fans of the genre to watch.

"Karate Kid 2" (Karate Kid-2, 1986)

After the success of the first part, it would be a shame not to make a sequel. But Directors are usually faced with the following task - NOT TO REPEAT, to take all the best from the original and remove the shortcomings. The story begins where the first part ends - Miyagi beats Kreese and flies to Japan to visit his father and takes Daniel with him. There are no signs of trouble, but there they both encounter Miyagi’s old enemy, the rich man Sato (Danny Kamekona) and his goofy nephew (Yuji Okumoto) - they do their best to ruin the main characters’ holiday by destroying houses, gardens and terrorizing the village in which they settled. Further down the line: meeting the girl Kumiko (Tamlin Tomita) - the old one was leaked offscreen by breaking up, the hero’s constant spread of rot with brutal beatings from the commander’s nephew, and so on.

Until the middle, the film looks smooth and even interesting - but from the moment of the miraculous breaking of the ice, I began to tense up, and the realism and logic of what was happening began to slide into the abyss. especially in the moment with the storm, where Danny ALONE saves the girl without outside help, where the nephew is sent by the suddenly clear-eyed diahon in three letters and is apofued in the final fight, where the nephew is not twisted and does not give him p****s for such an attitude towards the holiday , but they allow Daniel to brutally and bloodily fight with him, instead of real help in a dangerous fight (there are bricks and stone things all around, on which both of them can hit their young heads to death), the crowd takes out previously stored mini-drums and begins to twirl them.

I do not recommend watching this film and ending the plot in the first part in your own head - the continuation is much worse, despite many smart thoughts from the lips of Master Miyagi about many years of enmity and eternal love. The whole script, which barely keeps all the clichés within its framework, cracks and falls apart by the second half: again, a stupid training montage with dangerous and useless training (drumming technique is actually something) and again, Daniel, who seemed to be trained and easily endured blows at the end of the first film suffers brutal beatings with a shaggy face, the film is saved only by the relative bloodiness and realistic (in places) reaction to blows in fights.

"Karate Kid 3" (Karate Kid-3, 1989)

We must give the creators their due - the third part is an example of how competently you can continue the first part so that it is easy to ignore the second - for Kreese it begins exactly where the first part ended.

According to the story, while the heroes were wandering around Japan, Kreese, the main villain of the first part, suffered a collapse - the students left him (suddenly all at once realizing what a deer he was) and his once cool school went bankrupt and Kreese himself was sent away everywhere. In desperation, he goes to his old army buddy Terry (Thomas Ian Griffith), who, with a lot of money, restores the Cobra Kai school with a wave of his hand and decides to frantically and maniacally use all the funds to humiliate and destroy Miyagi and Daniel. Danny helps Miyagi open her own shop selling Bonsai trees and meets a new girl, and the creators uglyly dumped the old one behind the scenes with one phone call.

When I started watching, I was afraid of a dumb guy from the very beginning - but no, I began to like the story of Kreese, who had lost everything, and a lot of teenage issues were put into the film: here you have starting everything all over again, and new love, and the attempts of a teenager to play business, and overcoming new enemies, and confronting a truly dangerous person. In addition, it began to dawn on Daniel, who had again begun to frantically and painfully receive him, that training with Miyagi was a mess, and the topic of “more correct training” and a subsequent quarrel with an old friend was raised. However, ALL of these lines were mercilessly screwed up by the creators and abandoned without being revealed during the main plot. Then the film repeats the events of the first part almost 1 in 1, only it all looks pathetic (especially during Terry’s conversation with the new final boss, where he confidently asks for 50% of the business).

As a result we have:

• Daniel, being a loser, remained the same, comically running from the technical head bastard Mike Barnes (I thought he was played by Sasha Mitchell, it turned out to be Sean Kanan) and defeating him thanks to luck and his own stupidity.
• Miyagi’s pacifism and the subsequent repeated destruction of his property completely deprive us of faith that he is adequate and the scriptwriters turn him from a wise teacher into a typical Yoda-like Zen-do-not care (yes, that same stupid Yoda who missed Anakin and allowed the arrival of Palpatine).
• The POLICE appears for the first time in the film (Daniel, tired of the endless blows and stupidity of the teacher, will call them) - but there is no faith in them, they will not help. They could justify, of course, that Terry bribed them - but then the cops would be shown to be corrupt, which is unacceptable for a children's movie. That's right, let's show them as useless instead.
• After the victory, the film simply ends and we do not find out what happened to Kreese and his friend - they were not arrested, they were not deprived of everything, and they could easily kill the heroes after the fight, as Tong Po did in the flawed plot of the second Kickboxer.
• At the tournament, Glavgad constantly uses prohibited strikes and unsportsmanlike behavior, which results in immediate disqualification. They may point out to me that the tournament was bought by Terry Silver, but the corruption of the judges has not been demonstrated, and Miyagi, who should be indignant, remains silent.

Even though this film is better than the second one by a couple of orders of magnitude, I do not recommend watching it - it causes the disease “Facepalmus Ubivatus” and you can be injured.

"Another Karate Kid" (Next Karate Kid, 1994)

At a World War II parade, Miyagi meets the widow of a deceased friend and meets her granddaughter Julie (Hillary Swank). The child experiences the death of his parents in a car accident at home and assaults at school: local physical education teacher Dugan (Michael Ironside) has created a certain squad of vigilantes from the guys, engaged in beating problem students, one of them brazenly approaches Julie. Miyagi (in this part I finally learned his name, Keisuke) decides to help her, explaining that it was he who taught their family karate (which is probably why Julie can’t stand up for herself).

What happens next is the standard stupidity: moronic training (jump from one rock to another and you'll learn karate), the school principal behaving like degenerates, Shaolin monks (we won't eat at the table with those who kill cockroaches), men at a gas station and at a bowling alley , who found an idiotic way to get to the bottom of Miyagi and the villains themselves, beating people and setting cars on fire; as well as magic tricks with arrows and bowling balls. The only adequate person in this film is Eric McGowan, the heroine’s friend (Chris “as if Johnny Cage” Conrad), but this does not save the film.

It's a shame that the good topics that were raised again (a bad teacher and distracting a child from grief by practicing karate) turned out to be so mediocrely merged. The fights here are also poorly staged. The film is not recommended for viewing even for those who liked the previous ones.

"No retreat, no surrender" (1986)

Yes, that famous movie is here too - it's also a high school action drama with most of the clichés nailed down. I remember how popular he was in the early 90s, how often he was shown in our boxes... The reasons for his high popularity are two in one - the young Jean Claude Van Damme, who plays the Russian. Many fans of his work younger than me do not always know about this film. Well, it's time to review it.

According to the plot, Jason (Curt McKinney) practices karate at his father's dojo, but does not follow the instructions, wanting to be like Bruce Lee. But the local mafiosi want to rake in the hall, dad gets a lulya from the Russian mercenary Ivan (ZhKVD) and, unable to bear the shame, goes to another city to indulge in whining and blame his anger on his son and his hobbies. Jason is trying to find friends and, with the help of his knowledge of karate and wushu, stands up for his new friend, for which he was stupidly slandered at the new karate school. Further down the line - meeting the girl of the local alpha guy and a shameful brutal beating. However, taking pity on a guy living in a world where there is no police, Bruce Lee himself appears to him and teaches him fancy techniques, after which the hero will again encounter Ivan.

You can scold me, you can unsubscribe from my reviews and not read them further - but personally, I think this film is very stupid and overrated and now I will explain these words of mine:

• The synopsis promises us a guy who “enters into battle with gopotas and criminals,” gets Bruce Lee himself as a coach (though only in a dream) and wins “in a serious tournament against a Russian fighter, contrary to the forecasts of experts.” Too pretentious - but not like that. The plot plagiarizes "Karate Kid" in everything, and the only difference is that the main villain is the Russian mercenary Ivan and the teacher is not an old grandfather, but a ghost, that's all. There are no traces of “criminals” here, but there is a crowd of morons from the local karate school, and the “serious tournament” is just a local showdown between the school and the mafia.
• A huge number of stupid characters (especially the hero’s helpless father) and moronic plot twists, unrealistic non-sparring training and huge holes in the plot (and when did the hero manage to get to know the heroine to the level of “I can fuck with her the first time she appears on camera”? )
• Bruce Lee doesn’t look like himself (with a huge number of “clones” and cosplayers of him in the world), but Kurt McKinney slightly resembles his son Brandon (who, by the way, refused to play here, but in vain, I would watch Vanya’s fight against him)
• And yes, the main character will not take revenge on his tormentors. Van Damme will do it for him, and if I were Jason, I would hold my girlfriend, smiling as Ivan turns the karatekas who beat him and his friends into pieces of meat.

There is only one factor that saves the film - a young JKVD in excellent shape, who showed a good fighting game with a bunch of techniques and interactivity with the scenery - how cheerfully he wrapped the degenerates in ropes and mocked them! The final fight with McKinney is also good - he uses Jeet Kune Do techniques that look beautiful in the movies.

You can watch it in full, tying your facepalming hand to the chair in advance, only for nostalgic purposes. For the rest - look for the final disassembly on YouTube, it will not disappoint you. There are also no cranberries in the USSR, although it was the presence of the Soviet athlete and the flag that lured the viewer to the cinema with a pretentious beautiful poster, even if there was no CONFRONTATION between the sports schools of the USSR and the USA.

There are also two sequels with Lauren Avedon, Cynthia Rothrock and Keith Vitali, but they are not about that at all and the genre is different. Read more from Raven in his review.

"Showdown" (Showdown, 1993)

This movie with Billy Blanks I’ve already reviewed it, so we won’t dwell on it for long. Here the plot plagiarizes Karate Kid in more detail and, despite the fact that I didn’t really like the film the first time I watched it, the second time I watched it in more detail for comparison with other films and this is what came out:

• The hero is hit much harder, but the realism of the damage is much lower here - “Lots of High Kicking” here replaces Kung Fu. The fights look better and are more clearly shot, and the hero (played by Kenn Scott, who previously appeared in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) looks more dignified at the end, although there is nothing particularly pretentious here.
• Billy Blanks is inferior to Morita and Chan in charisma, but his training looks much more realistic than theirs and even sparring is carried out with the student. He has two fights here: with James Liu and Ray Gamboa in the room and Patrick Kilpatrick at the end, with a demonstration, in addition to the mentioned highkicking, elements of the ground, and in this aspect Blanks beats Morita (and for some, Chan, but this is debatable and even more). Also, he has a more developed backstory (probably even the most developed in the subgenre)
• The film is much more boring than Karate Kid (to which there are also direct references in the form of a bandage on a minor character)
• Most of the stamps are in place and they are exaggerated

Should I watch or not? It's up to you to decide, only old Billy can save you here.

"Never Back Down" (2008)

This 2008 film was quite sensational at the time, firstly, raising the fashionable theme of MMA, and secondly, as if returning American hand-to-hand action films to the A-class and, therefore, to cinemas.

In the story, high school student and American style football player Jake (Sean "Kyo Kusanagi" Faris) moves from the old city to Orlando, where everyone lives a luxurious life. There he becomes famous thanks to old football fights uploaded to YouTube and he is cunningly lured to a major party by local authority Ryan (Cam Gigandet) and his girlfriend (Amber Heard), where Ryan provokes the hero into a fight and beats him to the punch. Jake wants revenge and his new nerd friend Max (Evan "Quicksilver" Peters) recommends that he turn to rogue trainer Jean Roqua (Djimon Hounsou). And then difficulties with the coach, with Ryan, with the slut girl, again the tournament - and victory.

The film left me with a double impression, so we’ll look at the pros and cons:

Pros:

• The film tries to differentiate itself from Karate Kid, which is why it is often called a remake of No Retreat, No Surrender, and even to me at first glance it seemed like it was a remake of Showdown rather than Karate Kid. Attempts to differentiate (major town instead of slums, the hero is not a sucker from the beginning, and so on) count as a plus
• Finally, completely realistic workouts! The hero threshes a punching bag (not wood), learns from a coach how to hit and wrestle correctly, SPARRS with other students, works with gloves and uses elements of equipment. This is a huge plus and a balm for the soul after so many films of both the subgenre under review and hand-to-hand action films in general (remember “Kickboxer” and kicking wood)
• There are a lot of subtexts. In addition to the main ones (be able to overcome yourself, learn patience, bad parents, etc.) there are also hidden ones, for example, the ability to choose the right friends - I’m talking about the scene of the beating of the nerd by the head bastard, it is very instructive; as well as luring the hero to that very party.
• A-class design: the film constantly plays youth music that is “on point”, the picture is colorful, there is a lot of fan service in the form of naked women and guys, handsome guys are cast for the roles of heroes and heroines, references to Internet memes and the modernity of what is happening
• The hero is far from a loser and behaves, although he behaves like a moron in some places (beating up Mexicans in a car), but his behavior is quite realistic
• Normal training for Sean Faris and Cam Gigandet

Cons:

• Many stupid clichés have migrated here: the hero’s move is a far-fetched idea (he could have stayed in the old city without any problems); an American football player (and a good and powerful fighter at that) gives away a dry run to MMA; the stupid behavior of the people surrounding the hero and, of course, the ABSENCE OF POLICE (for the showdown on the road and SUCH beating of the nerd, she could easily overtake Ryan and Jake)
• Epileptic camera and weak fight editing. Fortunately, it’s not as bad as in many other action films of that time, but it makes the fights difficult to watch
• The fights look monotonous, even the Strelka MMA League for semi-professionals looks more interesting in places. However, the final fight turned out to be quite good, and the heroes mix the style of high kicks in a jump, paying tribute to past fighters, and MMA, paying tribute to fashion
• Disrespect for other styles - only MMA! American football (along with hockey) is a semi-fighting sport and some athletes often switch between them and MMA. Banter over capoeira is also not the topic, especially after watching the fights of Marcus Aurelio

As a result - for me the film is a solid three out of five: everything seems to be normal, but the aftertaste is the same as after cheap clones and sequels of Karate Kid. The film also leaves behind one thought that elevates it above the rest - the topic of the dangers of MMA for (and against) untrained people. In particular, I thought about how I could resist a raging half-wit who knows mixed martial arts if I meet him on the street/on the road/in line/in a nightclub (even though I’m not the type to go there)? It can be recommended for viewing - but only for once, no more - and provided that you are patient with the clichés mentioned above.

"Karate Kid" (Karate Kid, 2010)

The official remake of the first film with minor changes in the plot and setting hit theaters again many years later. I think it would have gone unnoticed if not for one circumstance - the legendary Jackie Chan himself was invited to play the role of the Teacher! The role of the hero is played by Jaden Smith (BLAAAAT!!!!))), and the action is transferred to China.
Otherwise, the plot is 95% similar to the original and differs only in certain moments.

What can we say? Along with the clichés of the old film, its advantages were also carried over - an interesting measured story about a boy and his teacher. However, is everything as successful as in the first part? More details:

• Like "Never Give Up", the film was made for A-class, for wide release - and the release was not bad, about 400 lyams around the world. In general, the picture is not bad, bright, the characters are memorable, the tournament is more pathetic than in the first film.
• Jaden Smith is inferior to Ralph Macchio in terms of acting, but, contrary to the opinions of critics, he is not at all annoying with his presence and shows diligence - besides such a legend as Chan.
• The main villains are played well and less cranishly than in the original, both the enemy of the hero (Zheiwen Wang) and the stern teacher (Yu Rong Guang). But the attempt to transfer the script 1 to 1 did not go well when combined with Guan’s acting - it’s hard to believe that a man with such a serious “coach” face would spin cranberry nonsense from the first part.
• But the battles were a little disappointing - I expected more from the final tournament. The fights are filmed with a mixture of flickering and crooked editing, and only fragments of blows (especially the beautiful final superkick) look great. A similar situation was in the recent “Losers” from Phillip Rea. Only Jackie Chan looks decent in this aspect on the screen.
• About “extreme workouts.” When I saw the moments with “lift your jacket 200 times” and the rationale for this training, I received a concussion from three thespalms... However, the further training looks more adequate - but is still cliched and cannot be compared with “Never Give Up”
• The rest of the clichés are also here, in particular, I didn’t like the made-up excuse to move to China for permanent residence.
• The main question... No, not about the police (here they were elegantly excluded from the plot thanks to the transfer of the action to “harsh Asia”, where the heroes do not know anyone), but about the TITLE of the film: why the KARATE kid, when the style is Wushu (or Kung -Ugh in a modern way)? The creators found an excuse, even two: firstly, the film is called “Kung Fu Kid” in the Asian box office, and secondly, the boy is called that name by his rivals, hinting at the original 1984 film. For us, the main reason in fact is to invite fans of the old Kid to the movies.

Now about Chan. Comparisons between him and Morita are already being made and not in favor of the latter - of course, this is Jackie Chan himself! My opinion: Morita played a patient and kind friend, more suitable for a children's film, while Chan turned out to be much darker, with a very cruel drama behind him. I don’t argue, he played great here (which greatly pleased and surprised me), but Morita looked better AS A FRIEND to the hero (in the first part, of course). As a mentor, Chan surpasses Morita here, giving the boy more useful exercises.

Regarding the fights with Chan, more was expected from them. Even if Chan is cool in the first showdown with the karatekas - and there is also a second one, in the alternative ending with the teacher of the villains, the level of coolness and humor as in the old action films is no longer there, I’ll assume that the matter is not so much in the old age of the actor, but rather in the script, since the film is not only about him, but also about the boy - God forbid it will overshadow it. In addition, the fights are spoiled by the modern vision of editing and filming scenes - close-ups, ragged editing and too fast camera - but the fights themselves are watchable, interesting and against the background of the rest of the slag (both in the remake itself and in the original and clones) they look cheerful.

Hack and predictor Aviator - The Karate Kid is watchable: this is a pleasant children's movie for no more than one viewing with Jackie Chan as its main attraction, the downside, in addition to the smoothed out cliches, is the wrong ending - the alternative one looks much cooler and more logical. Better or worse than the original? A little worse, a lot of this film is saved by the presence of Jackie Chan.

That's all for now. Perhaps if I recognize or remember more films in this subgenre. I'll watch them and update this review. Yes, I remember that there is also "The Losers" from Phillip Rea, but it has already been reviewed twice and only one mention will be enough; to the heap, there is another film where the president’s entire son was trampled at school, but I don’t remember the name.

However, there is one thought after all these films. It’s a sad thought - if this happens in their schools, well, they beat the kids to death like this in front of everyone, humiliate them without the help of adults (Sensei are often portrayed as random mime crocodiles), then it’s not at all surprising that they constantly have Columbine-style tragedies when children come to school with shotguns and shoot their classmates and teachers.

Therefore, so that your children do not suffer from the school hierarchy, teach them to defend themselves from early childhood, be Mr. Miyagi for them, otherwise they will either get into trouble (the 90s are over, but nothing guarantees their non-return), or to all sorts of Crises that suffocate guys with kimono belts, breaking them for huge money in useless cormorant training or forcing them to commit crimes - and the old Chinese or the black janitor may not be around.

Be healthy!

Author: uranium
Especially for Fight-Films.Info

Home » Reviews » Author's reviews » Review of the series of films of the genre "Karate Kid" from Uran
Tags: Never Back Down, No Retreat No Surrender, Showdown, The Karate Kid, Billy Blanks, Jade Smith, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Cam Gigandet, Martin Cove, Pat Morita, Ralph Macchio, Thomas Ian Griffith, William Zabka

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