Karate Kid: Legends (Jonathan Entwistle, 2025)
Solid but entertaining from start to finish, Karate Kid: Legends is nothing to write home about if you’re not the target audience, but it gets the job done in its own efficient though somewhat impersonal style.
Directed by Jonathan Entwistle (I Am Not Okay With This) from a script by Rob Lieber (Peter Rabbit), it weaves together the timelines of Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan (who gets top billing here) while introducing Ben Wang as Li Fong aka the next Karate Kid, in a franchise that now encompasses both the Karate Kid movies and the Cobra Kai television series.
After a brief prologue in Beijing, Li Fong is taken to New York by his mother (Ming-Na Wen) to recover from his older brother’s death (which is explained in flashbacks) and to start a new life there.
Li Fong quickly becomes friends (with the possibility of more) with nice girl Mia (Sadie Stanley), whose friendly father Victor (Joshua Jackson) is a former boxer who now owns a pizzeria, but is also in debt to a shady guy, O’Shea (Tim Rozon), who runs a gym called Demolition.
O’Shea’s top karateka is Conor (Aramis Knight), who also happens to be Mia’s toxic ex-boyfriend and who immediately senses a possible opponent in Li Fong. Which ignites an intense rivalry that will lead all the way up to a final fight in the annual Five Boroughs karate tournament, which has a prize money big enough to get Mia’s dad out of trouble and make everybody else feel pretty good about themselves too.
This includes both Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), who not only flies in from China to help his pupil, but also goes to California to charter Daniel (Ralph Macchio) as an extra coach, in a set-up clearly meant to echo the No Way Home use of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire to accompany Tom Holland. Li Fong is even described as the Chinese Spider-Man to ram that point home.
I doubt very much Karate Kid: Legends will be that successful (or that the multi-generational appeal will be enough to draw ‘em all in), but for my sins I quite enjoyed seeing it. It clips along at a nice pace, it’s well shot and edited and it checks in at a little over ninety minutes. What’s not to like? I ask you.
Ben Wang is charismatic enough to fill the shoes of his predecessors, while the rest of the cast also seem happy to be there, and the fight scenes look alright too in my book.
If that all sounds a bit too much like I’m damning the movie with faint praise, there is probably some truth in that, but give me a break, it’s not like I was expecting Oscar-worthy material to begin with.
As far as surface level fun goes I’m just gonna go ahead and give it three stars.
Note: Karate Kid: Legends has been out in some South American countries since early May. It is released this week in most countries around the globe, while Greece, Singapore, China and Taiwan will follow next week and Spain, France and Japan in August.