The Karate Kid review

Nothing kills the taste of a horrible movie than a movie that not horrible. Scientific fact. When the movie is actually pretty good then you're doing gangbusters. The new "Karate Kid" is a very nice pallet cleanser. It's no amazing piece of work, but it's well made and is just as rousing as the original.

Did you ever see the original film? Yeah? Well it's pretty much the same thing with a different cast and crew (sans producer Jerry Weintraub). Sometimes making a beat for beat remake is a bad thing, like what Gus Van Sant did with "Psycho". However "The Karate Kid" ain't no and will never be "Psycho" and with something like this just about anything can work. This movie is a rousing crowd pleaser about a Dre (Jaden Smith) who moves to China with his mother and meets a cut girl. However said girl seems to be a magnet for this group of little doucebag Chinese kids that like to fight and therefore she is a magnet for public ass kickings.

Enter Jackie Chan's Mr. Han. He's a janitor at Dre's new apartment complex and helps him out one day by fending off the group of bullies. After that... well you know, training and more training. Dre learns to world of kung-fu (not karate) and how it can apply to ones everyday existence. He gets to know the girl a lot better and starts to really enjoy his time in China, despite the fact that it's all leading up to him fighting publicly and possibly getting his beat down on a larger platform. No matter... fore Mr. Han is a good teacher that turns pissy and lonely Dre into an ass kicking machine that never says quit.

Smith plays this like a mini version of his dad really. Here he does a stand up job and doesn't feel flimsy or fake. In the fight scenes it's apparent that he worked damn hard to prepare for those pieces and the end result pays off. Chan is somebody who honestly with every shitty kids movie he makes I just try and remember the good days. I try and remember that "Police Story" is one of the best action films I've ever seen and that his fight scenes are among the best in film. Getting to see him showing his age and being grizzled is exactly what I want from him. I've yet to see his film from earlier this year "Shinjuku Incident", but I've heard nothing but good things and more surprising is that much of it is about his performance. Like Jean Claude Van-Damme in "JCVD", Chan just needs the right material to shine and I think his work this year (sans "The Spy Next Door") is a step in the right direction.

Overall "The Karate Kid" remake is entertaining and highly watchable. Sure it's got cheese and it's flow is off from time to time, but it's fun and gratifying to see punk ass kids get kicked in the head. Now given the amount of cash this film has taken in so far the early world is of course sequel; might I make a suggestion? Now that he's an awesome ass kicker, why not explore a true blue kung-fu picture with Jaden leading the way. There are forces at work attempting to bring back the kung-fu genre so why not be at the forefront? Just a thought though.