They don’t play the original often enough on cable. But they will still be playing it on cable in twenty years. The new one might not find the same accord. Although it doesn’t have my endorsement, it is not rotten, either. Our young actor Jaden, son of uber-famous Will Smith, has pluck and presence as Dre, and looks skilled and nimble during the martial arts action. Chan is doing one of his aging man morose acts as Mr. Han, the kind he’s been doing since he lost his stunt abilities, but he has a caring aura around him and so we buy that he has a bond with the kid.
Besides Mr. Han, Dre has two friends the entire movie: a white kid we meet at the beginning and never see again and a gifted young violinist Meiying (Han Wenwen) who has bashful eyes for him. Dre’s mom is played by that feisty actress Taraji P. Hensen (she was nominated for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), and in screenplay neglect, we never get an idea of what kind of job she got that forced her to move with her young son to China! She hardly comes off as a supermom with international communication skills, but hey, it may be set in China but it’s still the land of Hollywood corn.
If there is one big unintentional laugh it takes place within minutes after their arrival, it is observed that Dre is to start school the next day. Haha, so the movie is saying that when mom’s move their sons to foreign soil they don’t get there early to settle in and observe local sights for the first few days, no, they start work and school right away, as in next day. Another lack of subtlety: Dre gets in a fight with the local bully (Wang Zhenwei) who will become his adversary for the rest of the movie.
There is some Chinese flavor and even some dialect (with English subtitles) throughout the movie, and visits to a kung fu palace is actually the kind of awesome sequence that mightily supersedes expectations. For a moment, Dre even gets into the yin and yang spirit of advanced martial arts and we see through his eyes that he understands the interior of his opponent.
At the big tournament, Dre has to get in the ring with a number of bullies who are trained under the Fighting Dragon school which is coached by the unforgiving Master Li (Yu Rongguang Yu). It is through this character that we see the movie look at the Chinese as cruelly exotic: Master Li punches a student who is a tad on the merciful side. Once again, mercy is for the weak. Yet throughout the entire film, it’s odd, in an off-putting way, to see 12-year olds beat each other and somehow more accessible to have seen 17-year olds with developed bodies compete in the original film. The training sequences are the coolest part, but substituting the wax on / wax off is jacket on / jacket off, yet when Dre demonstrates his moves for the first time – well, it makes you want to join a karate class.
Depending on who you are, you might or might not have a problem with 12-year olds engaging in hand to hand combat. And so you want to know, how is the action in the final tournament? Is it cool? The honest answer is its half good, half bad. Half the time the action is photographed with finesse shots that are held steady and comprehensible, but the other half it is done in jarring close-ups and indistinguishable cutaways. Smith is a movie star in the making though – if he keeps his dreadlocks he can play Predator one day. But sincerely, it would be a just choice if Spike Lee or John Singleton cast him in something one day.
Go to the official site at http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/thekaratekid/
Grade: C
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