New film follows same story arc – but with a kung fu twist
The original
”
Karate Kid
”
came out in 1984 and was a story of a true underdog. Daniel
Larusso (Ralph Macchio) moves to a new town with his single mom and
quickly becomes the target of local bullies. Things only get worse
for him when popular girl Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue) takes an
unlikely liking to Daniel.
The other guys in school start to beat him up on a regular basis
and he doesn’t know how to defend himself. That changes when he
persuades Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), a handy man, to give him karate
lessons.
New film follows same story arc – but with a kung fu twist
The original “Karate Kid” came out in 1984 and was a story of a true underdog. Daniel Larusso (Ralph Macchio) moves to a new town with his single mom and quickly becomes the target of local bullies. Things only get worse for him when popular girl Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue) takes an unlikely liking to Daniel.
The other guys in school start to beat him up on a regular basis and he doesn’t know how to defend himself. That changes when he persuades Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), a handy man, to give him karate lessons.
The new “Karate Kid (2010)” follows pretty much the same storyline. Just change the names, the time and the place. Oh yeah, and the kid learns kung fu instead of karate.
Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mom Sherry (Taraji P. Henson) move to Beijing, in China, when she has to take a job for work. Screenwriter Christopher Murphey (who based the screenplay on the original story by Robert Mark Kamen who wrote the screenplay for the original series) takes no time in getting to the meat of the story. Just moments after Dre arrives in China and before he’s even unpacked any of his belongings, he is getting beat up at a playground near his house.
He gets the attention of a group of bullies when he starts talking to Meiying (Wenwen Han), a cute Chinese girl who is supposed to be at the park practicing her violin. The girl speaks English, of course, and is friends with the number one bully Cheng (Zhenwei Wang) who speaks just enough English to tell Dre to stay away from all the Chinese students.
The bullying continues in school, where the boys knock Dre’s lunch tray onto his clothes and stalk him after class. Still Dre and Meiying continue to talk when the bullies aren’t watching.
One day after school a group of six gangs up on Dre in a back alley. Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), the maintenance man in Dre’s building, comes to his rescue. He fends off all the kids mostly by blocking them and knocking them into each other. He scoops up Dre and treats him with some ancient Chinese medicine. He shares his knowledge of kung fu and says what the boys were doing is not the real deal.
Dre wants Mr. Han to teach him, but Mr. Han refuses at first. It is only after he agrees to enter Dre into a kung fu tournament in which the boy will have to fight all the bullies in individual matches that Han agrees to teach him.
Now for anyone who remembers the original movie, Mr. Miyagi didn’t get straight to the training with Daniel-san. He made him do all sorts of tedious things that seemed to have nothing to do with karate – like the wax on, wax off work on the car. Mr. Han has a similar technique. For days, he has Dre stand at a wooden post in his yard. The boy has to hang up his jacket, take down his jacket, put it on, take it off and toss it on the ground. Repeatedly – for days.
It all seems really pointless, but of course Mr. Han has a secret motive for it that will eventually be revealed. Through the movie, we learn a little more about Mr. Han’s past but not much is revealed about Dre that viewers don’t already know.
I haven’t watched the original in its entirety in a long time, but I did catch a few minutes of it when it was playing on TV a few weeks ago. The acting and the dialogue were pretty bad. The remake is a little bit like that, especially since many of the Chinese actors in it have never been in a film before. Chan does hold his own as the somewhat mysterious Han, though anyone looking for his regular goofy antics won’t get much of it here. It’s hard tell if Jaden Smith will live up to the same potential as his acting parents (Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, who produced the film,) but the middle-schooler’s work-outs for the movie must have been grueling given how physically fit he is.
The movie offers a mostly clean experience for families and some lessons on being a good sport.
Melissa Flores can be reached at [email protected]. She writes a blog at http://melissa-movielines.blogspot.com.
