Karate Kid: Legends (2025)
*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Ralph Macchio
written by Rob Lieber
directed by Jonathan Entwistle
by Walter Chaw I have a complicated relationship with John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid. I saw it in the theatre multiple times when I was 11 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times more on VHS. I did not know that Noriyuki “Pat” Morita spoke without an accent in reality, didn’t trouble myself with the damage this type of sensei character did to my minority in this country, didn’t sense that this was any kind of cultural appropriation, because as an Asian-American kid born and raised in a predominantly white backwater of Colorado, this was and remains ground zero of my culture. Appropriation? Of what? Not Okinawan culture, surely–what’s left of it after our now-eighty-year occupation of it. No, this is American culture, for good and for bad; don’t blame someone else for it. The Karate Kid was my Rocky. (Same director and composer, even.) Mr. Miyagi, together with Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, both from the same year as The Karate Kid (1984), formed this foundational trilogy of Asian tokenism in the heart of the Reagan administration/Blockbuster Generation, during which I was reared. Perhaps not inconsequently, it’s this same period that sowed the seeds for our current neo-conservative Ragnarök. It was like they emerged at the same time on purpose, the Three Wise Men attending Evangelical Christ’s Young Life presumption to the reins of American Empire: the father (Miyagi), the son (Shorty), and the holy ghost (Long Duk Dong) constituting a thesis statement for the only way Asian-American men in their native film industry could be portrayed with the enthusiastic consent of anyone with an opinion. Can I get an “A(sian)men?”