Hollywood Must Die: The Karate Kid

By Akela Talamasca on April 29th, 2009

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Welcome once again to another edition of Hollywood Must Die, where I rant about how Hollywood’s predilection for rehashing old great movies is further weakening the herd, eventually leading to the heat death of the universe. Today’s rant: “The Karate Kid” remake.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG on so many levels. Let’s just get it out of the way: Jackie Chan is Chinese. Karate is a Japanese martial art. Hollywood, I know you can’t tell the difference between Asian ethnicities. In fact, you’ve proven that you can’t by your casting of Jackie as the driver of the Subaru in “The Cannonball Run”, which was the official Japanese entry to that fictitious race. Racial issues aside, are you really going to have Jackie training Will Smith’s kid in karate?

Maybe not, as this article tells us. Does The Kung-fu Kid sound better? More appealing? I’d actually argue that it’s even worse than a remake. There’s something more honest and wholesome about teaching a kid to defend himself with karate than there is by teaching him kung fu. Kung fu by now is so corrupted by movie shenanigans that you literally can’t see people doing it without thinking of “The Matrix”. Karate is Chuck Norris, heel-kicking a bad guy to the dirt while saving a baby calf from a barn fire. Kung fu is Jet Lee attacking a man’s pressure points with blinding speed until he bleeds from every orifice. There’s a certain something that kung fu has that I feel is a poor match for the tone “The Karate Kid” set up.

Also, the whole point of a remake is to fix the problems of bad movies. “The Karate Kid” is a great movie. Despite its look belonging strictly to the 80’s, it’s still enjoyable because its story is timeless. There’s nothing there that needs redoing. Wholesome kid learns to stand up for himself and get the girl through the power of karate. Done.

I don’t know that Jackie Chan can pull off the Wise Old Sage role convincingly, but even if he could, Will Smith’s son Jaden will no doubt be doing the whole precious li’l hip-hop slangin’ Will Smith “Aww, HELL no” attitude, and out the window goes any hope of suspension of disbelief.

In short, while I still hope for something interesting — because hope springs eternal, damn its eyes — I have no expectations of quality from The Karate/Kung fu/Taekwondo/MMA/Muay Thai/Savate/Jiu-jitsu/Krav maga Kid.