Director: Jonathan Entwistle
Writers: Rob Lieber, Robert Mark Kamen
Stars: Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson
Synopsis: After kung fu prodigy Li Fong relocates to New York City, he attracts unwanted attention from a local karate champion and embarks on a journey to enter the ultimate karate competition with the help of Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso.
While watching the gluttonous nostalgia fest that is Karate Kid: Legends, I kept waiting for Rob Garrison’s Tommy to appear in the end credits, cackling maniacally as he declared it was finally time to get this franchise into a body bag.
The latest entry is heavy on exposition, light on creativity, and too worried about imitating the original story—focusing so much on legacy characters that it forgets to establish any meaningful emotional connection. Karate Kid: Legends plays like the CliffNotes version of how to write a sixth installment in a franchise—hoping that shiny packaging and familiar faces will be a convincing enough disguise to take your money and run.
The story follows Li Fong (American Born Chinese’s Ben Wang), who is being mentored “not” to fight at a dojo by Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). The setting should look familiar to fans of the franchise, as the film includes a cleanup clip from The Karate Kid: Part II. For some reason, we now have to know the backstory of a once-forgotten shack on a dirty lake—one that has since been upgraded into a pristine, money-making operation.
Han now trains hundreds of students as the shifu of a wuguan, but Fong’s mother (The Joy Luck Club’s Ming-Na Wen) won’t allow him to participate. (It makes you wonder why she even lets him hang out there in the first place—but I digress.) Her resistance is rooted in shared trauma: both she and Li are haunted by the memory of losing a loved one to violence, a theme the film touches on only vaguely and without much finesse. Li’s mother is a doctor, and she accepts a position in New York City, prompting a move that leaves Mr. Han behind. Once in the city, Li meets the two inevitable characters of any mainstream coming-of-age story: a girl and her possessive, angry ex-boyfriend.
Li is smitten with Mia (Somewhere in Queens’s Sadie Stanley), who works at her father Victor’s (Doctor Odyssey‘s Joshua Jackson) pizza shop. Naturally, her ex, Conor (Ms. Marvel‘s Aramis Knight), is a well-known kung fu champion trained at a dojo run by O’Shea (Tim Rozon)—a loan shark Victor borrowed money from to open his restaurant, who also happens to be Connor’s sensei.
The script was written by Rob Lieber, a writer for television’s The Goldbergs and a handful of forgettable family comedies that you’ve hopefully blocked from memory. The narrative leaps the script takes to connect all these coincidences are so forced and yawn-inducing, they ought to come with a warning for neck strain from excessive eye-rolling.
I have no doubt that Lieber and director Jonathan Entwistle had their hearts in the right place. However, the final product feels like a handful of flimsy Disney Channel episodes lazily strung together. Having Li train Jackson’s Victor cleverly flips the script a bit, but soon the studio can’t help itself—rushing to bridge the franchise’s worlds, from Chan’s 2010 installment to the return of Ralph Macchio.
The result is a glorified Cobra Kai cameo that feels like two completely different films mashed together—lacking depth, honesty, and any semblance of normal human interaction. When Victor hears Li tell him the story about the loss of a loved one, and in the matter it happens, he replies with a canned response that is so robotic, I wondered if the character needed to be recharged. There is and attempt to explore the trauma Li has suffered, which should have been the soul of the story, using Karate to overcome the scars and survivors grief.
Instead, we get Li competing in some bizarre Five Boroughs tournament that feels like it was yanked from a defunct Mortal Kombat knockoff. Nothing appears sanctioned, yet somehow it’s acceptable for a bunch of underage kids to beat the hell out of each other on a skyscraper—for $50,000? And Li’s elders are just fine with this? He gets smashed in the head, knocked out cold, and his physician mother just wants him to compete instead of being checked by trained medical personnel?
Sure, it’s a movie, but Karate Kid: Legends feels like a watered-down, generic retread of a franchise running on fumes. The concept is simple, yet the execution stumbles, bogged down by clunky exposition, lame humor, and over-explained action beats. (Do we really need a slow-motion replay and graphics for every single point?) At this point, I’ll spring for the body bag—can Hilary Swank make a cameo to pull up the zipper and put this franchise out of its misery?
You can watch Karate Kid: Legends (2025) only in theaters May 30th!
