I was seven years old when the original version of The Karate Kid hit theaters and, like many my age, I was compelled to take karate lessons, likely with the hope that an eccentric old Japanese man would teach me how to catch flies with chopsticks and stand up to neighborhood bullies in black, sleeveless gi’s. Karate instructors were in hog heaven and every kid who saw the film had dreams of beating the much bigger kid at the karate tournament with a broken leg. With all that in mind, none of this will happen with any youngster who watches this 2010 version of The Karate Kid because it’s not even in the same dojo as the first film.

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Now, all that may be unfair to say, as remakes really should be able to stand on their own two (possibly hobbled) legs, but this remake is such a bizarre exercise in remake futility that comparisons have to be made simply because they bring it on themselves. Not only is the film not even nearly as compelling, dramatic or entertaining as the original, but the film is almost a metaphor for translating something from English to another language back into English again: you surely can see the effort put into it, but you still end up with the same result, only far less entertaining.

Structurally, the film is practically identical to the original film. The same elements of the new kid in town, the bullies, the eccentric martial arts instructor and, of course, the girl, are all still in place and they still fall in roughly the exact same line as the first film. But they take things to a whole new unnecessary level by taking said new kid, Dre (Jaden Smith) and moving him to China when his mother (Taraji P. Henson) is transfered there for her job at a car factory. Dre, like Daniel(-san) before him, has loads of confidence/machismo (not to mention kind of a prick to his mother) and of course this gets him in trouble with the Chinese bullies who, of course, go to the Cobra Kai of China, the name of which I was too bored to remember if they even mentioned it in the film. One day the bullies are beating him up and the homely maintenance man Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) puts some crazy moves on display and, eventually, agrees to teach young Dre the ways of kung fu (yes, kung fu, even though it felt more like a mix of kung fu, MMA and WWE) so he can fight these young baddies in a kung fu tournament.

It comes as no surprise to me that the film’s writer, Christopher Murphey, only has one other writing credit to his name, almost 10 years ago, although it makes me wonder how he landed such a high-profile gig. Aside from the fact that this film does not even come close to needing a 126-minute runtime - which drags ever so much throughout the entire film - but the story choices that were made seemed to be a conscious effort to be different from the original, but just similar enough to be familiar. Take Dre and the girl, Meiying (Wenwen Han). The first film actually made sense, because Daniel and Elizabeth Shue’s were teenagers and that’s what teenagers do. Here, Dre and Meiying are 12 and, well, you can’t really have that same kind of dynamic… because they’re 12. Instead they have more of a friendship thing going on and, while it wouldn’t be as weird as if they were “in love” with each other, it still treads on pretty much the exact same ground and makes it just as weird. While I’ll fully admit that I haven’t seen the original film in probably a few decades, and can’t comment with precise detail, it’s fairly safe to say that most of the film runs parallel with the original, substituting little things here and there. “Wax on, wax off” turned into the weird “jacket on, jacket off” thing, the new California neighborhood turned into the new Chinese neighborhood and so on and so forth.

However, there are a few totally new elements to this film, like a weird healing method that Mr. Han uses on Dre and a super-lame reveal about why Han is so downtrodden, but they were either incredibly unnecessary and slowed the film down even more. The real infuriating kicker comes with the ending, where they likely realized they changed it too much which forced them to over-complicate things even more to come up with, yeah, roughly the same exact result as we saw 25 years ago. The point is they didn’t NEED to do all this, but they were apparently so compelled to make the film so different and so similar at the same time that this is the result we end up with.

I will say that I did thoroughly enjoy Jaden Smith as the title kid Dre, who shows in this film all the charm, charisma and budding chops that truly make him his father’s son. He really is very fun to watch as Dre and he does draw you to the character and his journey, since it’s a lot of fun to see this c*cky kid try to adapt to Chinese life in his own stubborn way. While I didn’t really agree with where they tried to go with his character, I enjoyed Jackie Chan as Mr. Han and we do get other solid performances from Taraji P. Henson as the sweet but hard-nosed mother and Wenwen Han does a nice job as Meiying. Jaden Smith does indeed prove that, at the very least, he’s developing the chops to carry a whole movie on his shoulders, but even a budding young talent like Smith can’t overcompensate for such sloppy storytelling and lackluster direction from Harald Zwart.

If you haven’t heard of Harald Zwart, his last film was The Pink Panther 2 and he has Roller Coaster Tycoon in development - not a video game, a movie… It doesn’t seem like Zwart has ever tackled an action/fight-driven film like this, and some of the fights are captured nicely, but most of them feel over-edited and over-shot, not to mention the overly-bombastic, hit-you-over-the-head score and soundtrack that almost made me pine for the corny track, “You’re the Best.” He does do a fine job with most of the actors, but the film would’ve highly benefited from a director with more experience in capturing these fast-paced fights.

The Karate Kid is a somewhat-valiant effort at remaking an 80s classic and, for those younger moviegoers who haven’t seen the first film series, I have no doubt you’ll find this thoroughly entertaining. For those that grew up on the original film though, this remake is NOT the best… around…