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The Karate Kid Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for bullying, martial arts action violence and some mild language) Genre: Action, Drama, Family Theater release: June 11, 2010 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Harald Zwart Runtime: 2 hours 20 minutes Cast: Jaden Smith (Dre Parker), Jackie Chan (Mr. Han), Taraji P. Henson (Sherry Parker), Wenwen Han (Meiying), Zhenwei Wang (Chen) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If you were alive and out of diapers in North America in 1984, you probably remember Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita in The Karate Kid. If, like me, you were a teen back then, Mr. Miyaga's eccentric karate instruction methods ("wax on, wax off") have likely become a part of your pop culture psyche. The Karate Kid's enduring legacy makes the current remake seem inevitable. The question, of course, is whether the long shadow cast by the original makes the copy inevitably disappointing.

The answer: Yes and No. The new Karate Kid is not as good as the first. But it's not bad, either, and the reaction of youngsters at the screening I attended suggests viewers who haven't seen the original will definitely enjoy the new edition.

This time, our young hero is an African-American 12-year-old named Dre Parker (Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith), who is dislocated from his home in Detroit and plunked down in Beijing when his widowed mother is transferred by her employer. Dre is understandably unhappy with such an extreme move, but the charms of a violin-playing classmate named Meiying (Wenwen Han) get him thinking his new life might be OK. His optimism is short-lived, however, when a jealous local named Cheng (Zhenwei Wang) and his thuggish friends begin routinely delivering kung fu beatings to Dre for the crimes of being an outsider and catching the pretty girl's eye.

The situation continues to worsen until Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), the reclusive maintenance man at Dre's apartment building, steps in to stop an attack and reveals his secret identity as a kung fu master. Mr. Han confronts Cheng's teacher, who is misapplying the martial arts and instructing his students to be on the attack and show no mercy. In an effort to remove the imminent threat of bodily harm facing Dre, Mr. Han promises that his soon-to-be protégé will fight Cheng and his cohorts individually at an upcoming kung fu tournament. All that remains is for Dre to learn the ancient art. Fast.

Jaden Smith as Dre Parker

Even if you haven't seen the original, you can likely anticipate the rest of the plot. The fatherless Dre and the sonless Mr. Han forge a special bond, and the older mentors the younger in both the martial arts and the art of life in lots of picturesque, iconic Chinese locations. And then, of course, there's a whole bunch of fighting.

For the most part, this version of The Karate Kid follows the emotional arc of its predecessor very closely, with small adaptations to plot details along the way. The decision to set the story in China this time (and change the martial art to kung fu, making the title a bit of a misnomer) was an innovative one that allowed the filmmakers to intensify the fish-out-of-water quality of the story—and to mine plenty of beautiful and exotic locations. But the change in continents is explored rather one-dimensionally—Dre never attempts to learn the new language, and strangely enough everyone around him speaks to him in English, even when threatening to beat him half to death. Other tweaks to the plot have mixed results. The decision to make the hero much younger than in the original (thus allowing the film to be a vehicle for 11-year-old Smith) makes Dre and Meiying's love story awkward (a kissing scene in particular feels wildly inappropriate for 12-year-olds), and renders the violence in the film unsettling. One of the movie's funniest scenes, in which Mr. Han decimates the entire gang of boys by using them as weapons against each other, works better if viewers do not pause to reflect on the fact that we are watching a mature man beat up children who have not even reached their teens.

Jackie Chan as Mr. Han

Other plot adaptations work fine on their own even if they pale next to the original. Mr. Miyaga's various methodologies from the 1984 version (waxing the car, painting the fence, the famous crane pose at the ocean shore) are here boiled down into one such device (Mr. Han makes Dre put his coat on and off ad nauseum); I was disappointed that the new teacher only had one such technique, but the kids I was with thought it was great. In fact, tellingly, while I pined for certain intricacies missing as compared to the first Karate Kid, my daughter whispered to me that she thought the movie was borrowing from 2008's Kung Fu Panda. I guess there's nothing too new under the Hollywood sun.

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