{"id":9305,"date":"2010-06-12T14:31:49","date_gmt":"2010-06-12T22:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=9305"},"modified":"2010-06-12T15:45:04","modified_gmt":"2010-06-12T23:45:04","slug":"the-karate-kid-harald-zwart-2010-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=9305","title":{"rendered":"The Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2010): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy<\/a>.\u00a0 Viewed at Camino Real Cinema, Santa Barbara, CA<\/p>\n

\"\" Unlike the 1984 original, 2010’s\u00a0The Karate Kid<\/a><\/em>\u00a0does not rely on the\u00a0Okinawan based martial art, but rather the Chinese martial art of Kung Fu.<\/p>\n

In this update, 12 year old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) is forced to leave his\u00a0family and friends\u00a0in Detroit, because his mother Sherry Parker (Taraji P. Henson)\u00a0has been transferred to Beijing, China.\u00a0 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\u00a0gets beaten to a pulp by a group of local bullies.\u00a0 When Dre finally makes it back to his new apartment, his loving but unattentive mother is asleep on the couch.<\/p>\n

The next day, Dre starts school and miraculously has no swollen features or broken bones.\u00a0 He meets up with Meiying in the cafeteria, but also gets pushed around by the lead bully Cheng (Zhenwei Wang).\u00a0 Later, Cheng and the other bullies proceed to chase Dre all over town, catch up to him, trap him, and then\u00a0beat him to a pulp, until Dre’s apartment manager Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) suddenly appears out of nowhere to defend him.<\/p>\n

Keeping up so far?\u00a0 Well, Dre manages to convince Mr. Han to teach him martial arts,\u00a0after Mr. Han’s failed\u00a0attempt to make peace at the dojo of Cheng.\u00a0 Oh yeah, I failed to mention that while all of the above scenes\u00a0transpire, we have the whole “shaky cam” technique going on throughout, and\u00a0boy was it annoying – there are however\u00a0moments of captivating cinematography.<\/p>\n

Remember Daniel-san and the endearing Mr. Miyagi?\u00a0 This film is missing those\u00a0two elements and a lot more.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u00a0plot progresses.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What played (and seemed to work) in the mid-1980’s as a teen flick, with Daniel-san as a high school senior who\u00a0is uprooted\u00a0from the East Coast to the West Coast, and then gets his butt kicked,\u00a0doesn’t seem to work as well with\u00a0this small, 12 year old\u00a0African-American.\u00a0 As a kid\u00a0being transplanted from the U.S.\u00a0to Beijing and then gets a repeated ass-kicking, it might have\u00a0been more believable\u00a0(as my son pointed out), if the American kid had been of Asian descent, giving some validity to his repeated ass-kickings.<\/p>\n

Jaden Smith has a definite appeal\u00a0t0 the camera, and is a nice-looking kid.\u00a0 He is\u00a0however void of any raw acting talent, and comes across as blah.\u00a0 My\u00a0recommendation would be, to start\u00a0with small acting gigs (if one is looking for experience), and polish your craft before moving on to the big league – his\u00a0parents are the producers of this film, so go figure.\u00a0 I think the\u00a0kid to watch is Zhenwei Wang (Cheng),\u00a0he portrays a natural talent for acting, and played the perfect bully.<\/p>\n

If you want to see Jackie Chan in his prime, check out 1978’s Drunken Master<\/em>, or any of his Golden Harvest produced\/distributed films including 1995’s\u00a0Rumble in the Bronx, <\/em>but don’t waste your time on his more recent mainstream films, they’re boring and not worthy of his talent.<\/p>\n

Lastly, once again the clever and witty scenes were all shown in the trailers, leaving the audience with a zero element of surprise.\u00a0 Makes me think there’s not a lot of confidence in the film as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy.\u00a0 Viewed at Camino Real Cinema, Santa Barbara, CA Unlike the 1984 original, 2010’s\u00a0The Karate Kid\u00a0does not rely on the\u00a0Okinawan 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\u00a0family and friends\u00a0in Detroit, because his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}