KARATE KID: LEGENDS

Name: KARATE KID: LEGENDS
Item: KARATE KID: LEGENDS
Author: Review

"Honor Prevails"

Family Content: -1 Caution advised for older children, including teenagers, and sensitive adults.

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

KARATE KID: LEGENDS is about a young Chinese martial arts prodigy who gets help from his teacher in Beijing and from Mister Miyagi’s prize karate student, Daniel. Li Fong and his mother relocate from Beijing to New York City for an important hospital job. Li attracts unwanted attention from a local karate champion, the ex-boyfriend of a girl Li’s befriended. Li secretly helps the girl’s father, an ex-boxer running a local pizza parlor, train for some boxing matches, to earn extra money to save his business. However, the father’s seriously injured when an opponent cheats. Li feels he owes him something. So, he enters a citywide karate tournament for a $50,000 cash prize.

KARATE KID: LEGENDS has a complex plot leading up to the tournament. So, it lacks the dramatic power of the original 1984 KARATE KID movie. However, it does star Jackie Chan as the kung fu teacher and Ralph Macchio as the original Karate Kid. So, KARATE KID: LEGENDS is fairly entertaining. It has a pro-family worldview extolling honor, fair play and perseverance. However, there’s strong fight scenes and brief foul language.

Content:

(BB, CapCap, FR, L, VV, N, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong pro-family worldview with strong pro-capitalist elements stresses honor, perseverance, fair play, helping others, and sticking together in times of trouble, a scene shows a wall that seems like a small shrine to a beloved teacher and mother lights a candle by a small photo of her late older son;

Foul Language:

One “s” word, four “a” words, one crude insult, and one OMG profanity;

Violence:

Strong martial arts and boxing violence and three scenes of people fighting on the street includes punching, kicking, flips, a boxing match, a karate tournament, martial arts training, training to box, and a sucker punch on a subway;

Sex:

No sex, but there’s two or three mentions about teenagers having boyfriends;

Nudity:

Upper male nudity during a boxing match and while in training;

Alcohol Use:

No alcohol use, but a mention about a dead man enjoying rice wine;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Villains cheat, such as throwing an illegal boxing punch or sucker punching another teenage boy on the subway when he’s not looking, father of teenage protagonist’s new girlfriend owes money to loan sharks for his pizza restaurant.

More Detail:

In KARATE KID: LEGENDS, a teenage kung fu prodigy from China named Li in New York City needs help from Mister Miyagi’s prize student, Daniel, and Miyagi’s kung fu friend in Beijing, who used to teach Li and his late brother, to win the prize money in a citywide karate tournament to help out the father of Li’s new girlfriend. KARATE KID: LEGENDS has a complex plot structure, so it doesn’t reach the dramatic heights of the classic, original 1984 movie, but it’s an entertaining, pro-family action movie about honor, fair play and perseverance, with lots of martial arts fighting and some foul language, which merit caution for older children and younger teenagers.

Teenage kung fu prodigy Li Fong and his mother, a surgeon, relocate from Beijing to New York City when she gets an important hospital job. Li’s brother died after he and Li had a run-in with a kung fu opponent and his buddies after a tournament. Li feels he let his brother down during the fatal altercation.

Li promised his mother to stop kung fu training and fighting for tournaments. However, in New York, he attracts unwanted attention from a local karate champion who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia, a girl Li has befriended. Also, Li secretly helps the girl’s father, an ex-boxer with a local pizza parlor, train for some boxing matches to earn extra money to pay off a loan shark.

During the first boxing match, however, the father’s opponent throws an illegal punch and puts the father into a coma. Once again, Li feels he let somebody down, Mia as well as her father.

Li feels he owes them something. So, he decides to enter a citywide karate tournament with a $50,000 cash prize. His chances of winning look bleak. However, he gets help in training from his kung fu teacher in Beijing, Mr. Han, who enlists the help of Daniel LaRusso, the prize karate student of the late Mister Miyagi. One of Miyagi’s ancestors and one of Han’s trained together in martial arts long ago.

KARATE KID: LEGENDS has a complex plot structure leading up to the tournament. So, it lacks the dramatic power of the original KARATE KID movie, which was released 41 years ago. However, it does star Jack Chan as the kung fu teacher and Ralph Macchio as Daniel, the original Karate Kid. Macchio has become popular on Netflix recreating his role as Daniel in the hit TV series COBRA KAI. Also, Ben Wang makes a charismatic martial arts fighter in the movie as Li Fong. The movie has a good supporting cast beyond that. So, KARATE KID: LEGENDS is fairly entertaining. It also has some humor. For example, there’s a funny “jacket on, jacket off” routine that mimics the “wax on, wax off” jokes in the original KARATE KID.

KARATE KID: LEGENDS has a pro-family worldview that also stresses honor, perseverance and sticking together in times of trouble. The movie’s dialogue describes Han’s martial arts family and Mr. Miyagi’s martial arts family, which includes Daniel, as two branches coming from one tree. That’s also the kind of relationship the movie’s teenage protagonist, Li, establishes with his girlfriend, Mia, and her father. Finally, the plot revolves around helping a small businessman keeping his successful family business open and thriving.

Of course, there’s plenty of martial arts fighting in KARATE KID: LEGENDS, as well as the boxing match that sends the girl’s father to the hospital. KARATE KID: LEGENDS also has some brief foul language, which is mostly light. Finally, two scenes show light commemorative Buddhist shrines to Mr. Miyagi and to Li’s brother. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for older children and young teenagers.