The Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy.  Viewed at Camino Real Cinema, Santa Barbara, CA

Unlike the 1984 original, 2010’s The Karate Kid does not rely on the Okinawan based martial art, but rather the Chinese martial art of Kung Fu.

In this update, 12 year old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) is forced to leave his family and friends in Detroit, because his mother Sherry Parker (Taraji P. Henson) has been transferred to Beijing, China.  Upon landing, Dre meets another transplanted American kid, wanders around the neighborhood unsupervised, gets into a game of basketball, meets and greets a local Chinese cutie Meiying (Wenwen Han), and then gets beaten to a pulp by a group of local bullies.  When Dre finally makes it back to his new apartment, his loving but unattentive mother is asleep on the couch.

The next day, Dre starts school and miraculously has no swollen features or broken bones.  He meets up with Meiying in the cafeteria, but also gets pushed around by the lead bully Cheng (Zhenwei Wang).  Later, Cheng and the other bullies proceed to chase Dre all over town, catch up to him, trap him, and then beat him to a pulp, until Dre’s apartment manager Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) suddenly appears out of nowhere to defend him.

Keeping up so far?  Well, Dre manages to convince Mr. Han to teach him martial arts, after Mr. Han’s failed attempt to make peace at the dojo of Cheng.  Oh yeah, I failed to mention that while all of the above scenes transpire, we have the whole “shaky cam” technique going on throughout, and boy was it annoying – there are however moments of captivating cinematography.

Remember Daniel-san and the endearing Mr. Miyagi?  This film is missing those two elements and a lot more.  Mr. Han is the owner of a classic car, but there is no “wax-on, wax-off,” instead we have “jacket-on, jacket-off” due to Dre’s inability to hang up his jacket.  Mr. Han is neither cute nor funny, he has a dark side and comes across bitter – we find out the reason for this as the plot progresses.  The character of Dre is somewhat of a punk, and Smith’s dialogue is sometimes too old for him, not to mention his ridiculous on-screen kiss.

What played (and seemed to work) in the mid-1980’s as a teen flick, with Daniel-san as a high school senior who is uprooted from the East Coast to the West Coast, and then gets his butt kicked, doesn’t seem to work as well with this small, 12 year old African-American.  As a kid being transplanted from the U.S. to Beijing and then gets a repeated ass-kicking, it might have been more believable (as my son pointed out), if the American kid had been of Asian descent, giving some validity to his repeated ass-kickings.

Jaden Smith has a definite appeal t0 the camera, and is a nice-looking kid.  He is however void of any raw acting talent, and comes across as blah.  My recommendation would be, to start with small acting gigs (if one is looking for experience), and polish your craft before moving on to the big league – his parents are the producers of this film, so go figure.  I think the kid to watch is Zhenwei Wang (Cheng), he portrays a natural talent for acting, and played the perfect bully.

If you want to see Jackie Chan in his prime, check out 1978’s Drunken Master, or any of his Golden Harvest produced/distributed films including 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx, but don’t waste your time on his more recent mainstream films, they’re boring and not worthy of his talent.

Lastly, once again the clever and witty scenes were all shown in the trailers, leaving the audience with a zero element of surprise.  Makes me think there’s not a lot of confidence in the film as a whole.


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