[COLUMN] Karate Kid: Legends Collapses Under the Weight of Its Own Mythology | by Darren Mooney

Karate Kid: Legends is a movie in conversation with itself, effectively a feature-length debate about what exactly makes a Karate Kid movie a Karate Kid movie.

The first half of the movie argues for the Karate Kid as a reliable formula. It is a storytelling structure built around nice clean character arcs, a narrative pattern that connects the 1984 original to the 2010 remake. It is the story of a teenage child of a single parent who moves to a new city, struggles to fit in, and manages to find their place through the application of martial arts in a student-mentor relationship to an older male figure. Character growth, pseudo-profound life lessons and montages ensue.

In 1984, that child was Danny LaRusso (Ralph Macchio). In 2010, it was Dre Parker (Jaden Smith). In 2025, it is Li Fong (Ben Wang). In its first half, Legends makes a solid case that it is this formulation is what makes a Karate Kid movie such a joy to watch, as Li moves to New York with his mother (Ming-Na Wen). In a twist, Li already knows martial arts, and this time it is the kid who teaches the adult, as he helps pizza shop owner Victor (Joshua Jackson) prepare for his return to the boxing ring.

The film’s rhythms and structures are close enough to the original to feel familiar, but have just enough novelty to keep things interesting. It’s fun to watch a Karate Kid movie where the kid is the mentor character. Wang and Jackson have an easy charm. The film even gives Li a pretty compelling character hook, as he’s a talented young martial artist who has sworn off fighting following the death of his brother (Yankei Ge), and so training Victor has real stakes.

In this first half, Legends hits all of the beats that one might expect from a Karate Kid movie. It introduces a bully character, Connor Day (Aramis Knight), who will inevitably serve as the film’s climactic opponent. There is a potential love interest, as Li falls for Victor’s daughter, Mia (Sadie Stanley). There is a beautiful training montage built around the idea that “everything is karate”, as Li teaches Victor to train using the apparatus of the pizzeria. It’s very charming.

In this sense, Legends feels like a pretty decent sequel to the 2010 reboot, which was itself a surprise hit. It was a revival of a franchise that was largely thought to be dead, earning relatively positive reviews and grossing roughly nine times its budget. There is some joy to be derived in watching the competent execution of a reliable formula. Coming of age narratives are universal and reliable, and the Karate Kid has a pretty solid template for telling those sorts of stories.

Then, around the halfway point, Legends proposes an alternative argument for what makes a Karate Kid movie unique. In its second half, Legends suggests that it isn’t a slightly novel take on an enjoyable and proven formula that makes a Karate Kid movie enjoyable, but instead continuity. As it races towards the climax, Legends falls back on the argument that a Karate Kid movie is ultimately just a movie that is full of things that audiences will recognize from other Karate Kid movies.

To be fair, Legends tips its hand quite early. The film opens with a flashback to the events of The Karate Kid, Part II, when Danny visited Japan with his mentor, Mister Miyagi (Pat Morita). Mayagi offers an origin story for his karate, tying together Chinese and Japanese martial arts traditions. The film then cuts to Beijing, where Dre’s mentor, Han Shifu (Jackie Chan), is operating an impressively large martial arts school. With armies of children in color-coded uniforms, it looks like a franchise.

Legends is obsessed with the idea of franchising. The film’s two big closing jokes are built around the idea of expanding branding opportunities. Han suggests that Victor should open a “third location” for his pizzeria in Beijing. Then, back in California, Danny’s old bully, Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) jokes about setting up a Mayagi-branded pizza restaurant. “Olives on, olives off,” he proposes as one potential slogan.

In its opening scenes and in its back half, Legends becomes an exercise in brand management. Watching the film, it can feel like the movie’s primary purpose is to fold the 1984 original and the 2010 reboot into the same continuity. “Two branches,” various characters intone over the course of the film. “One tree.” Indeed, even that closing cameo from Johnny Lawrence feels like a rather clumsy effort to acknowledge the Cobra Kai spin-off streaming series in the context of the film.

This slavish devotion to continuity and the larger brand suffocates Legends in its second half. After Victor loses his big comeback fight and is sent to the hospital, Han makes the journey from Beijing to New York to help Li set things right. He convinces Li to enter a martial arts tournament to win the money necessary to help Victor pay off his debts, which will also conveniently allow Li to confront Connor and to work through his own guilt over his passivity during the death of his brother.

There are only ten days until the tournament, which sets up a fairly reasonable set of stakes. However, Legends immediately erases those stakes by having Han take two days to fly out to California to recruit Danny to help train Li. This is a strange decision. The film retroactively reveals that Han knew Mayagi, but this is the first time that he is meeting Danny. Of course, as two separate arms of the franchise, they know each other through reputation and each is respectful of the other.

It is never clear why Han needs Danny to help him train Li. After all, Han managed to train Dre on his own. Li has experience training with Han. Han has never worked with Danny before. Indeed, one of the recurring jokes in the second half is that Han and Danny offer contradictory advice and instruction, which is funny – but also suggests that having both coaches is counterproductive. What exactly does Danny add to this arrangement, except for eating one fifth of the schedule?

Macchio is a reasonably charming performer. There is a certain comfort in seeing a familiar face on screen in a familiar role. However, Danny adds nothing to the film. Instead, he sucks up valuable narrative real estate. The first half of Legends is built around the charming push-and-pull dynamic between Li and Victor, but Victor largely disappears from the second half of the movie to make room for sequences of Han and Danny repeating the mantra, “Two branches, one tree.”

There is a cynical clumsiness to this. Legends seems to believe that Danny has to be part of the narrative, because he is part of Karate Kid lore, but the film doesn’t have anything for him to do. Indeed, watching the movie, it’s hard not to feel like this is a miscalculation. Surely, given the streaming success of Cobra Kai, Johnny Lawerence is probably a more recognizable ambassador for the classic Karate Kid brand than Danny LaRusso. He’s certainly a more dynamic character.

If Legends works best as a sequel to the 2010 reboot, sharing that film’s understanding that The Karate Kid is more appealing as a sturdy narrative framework than as a collection of familiar iconography, then the film cracks under the weight of having to be a legacyquel to the 1984 original. Legends doesn’t have anything especially interesting to say about the specifics of the 1984 film, but feels compelled to give over an embarrassing amount of narrative real estate to lauding it.

There is a deeper question. Does the Karate Kid franchise really need to be treated like some sort of canonical text, complete with lore and continuity? To be fair, Sony are just repeating the formula that they employed with Ghostbusters, turning a comedy about ghost blowjobs into a saccharine meditation on the importance of family. This seems to be the destiny of every mildly charming throwaway ’80s franchise. Even The Goonies is getting a legacyquel.

This is a broader issue with the extent to which nostalgia has warped mainstream popular culture. One of the more interesting – and frustrating – aspects of the Cobra Kai streaming series is watching this happen in real time. The show’s first season demonstrates a healthy skepticism of nostalgia, suggesting that there is something slightly tragic and pathetic in these middle-aged men chasing their glory days of childhood. However, that wariness is eroded over the ensuing seasons.

In its first half, Legends feels like a true Karate Kid movie. It feels like the film understands what makes a Karate Kid movie different from other coming-of-age projects like E.T. or The Goonies. In its second half, as the movie becomes more insistent on its ties to a larger franchise continuity, Legends collapses under the weight of its mythology.