The Karate Kid

If I learned any lesson from this limp remake of The Karate Kid, it's that the best way to learn Kung Fu is through a series of hip hop-infused montages. According to this movie, one montage makes you understand discipline on some lightly profound level, two montages can teach you the basics, and about five more montages can make you a fury-fisted master. Considering how many montages are used to prop up this soggy movie, it's no wonder that protagonist Dre (Jaden Smith, better known as Will Smith's kid) goes from feisty young weakling to body-flipping, knee-sliding Kung Fu machine over the course of a couple hours of screen time.

The fact that such a lesson about kung ku mastery can be gleaned from a movie titled The Karate Kid is relatively baffling. But don't worry, because this damp effort really isn't worth the energy required to make sense of such a discrepancy. People say karate a few times, but they really mean kung fu and we're all supposed to laugh and just stop paying attention to stupid details like that.

Perhaps the best explanation is that studio execs wanted a title people recognized and they were just going to completely crib from the first movie anyway, so why not call it The Karate Kid? Except they wanted popular and humorous Chinese martial arts star Jackie Chan to play the mentor role, so they just crammed the title and star together and patted themselves on the back. Yeah, that sounds about right. Either way, a discrepancy like that, however silly, isn't going to break a movie.

Fifty montages will do that just fine on their own. And they'll even teach you kung fu! Okay, not really, but this latest Karate Kid might convince some impressionable young child that hitting the fast forward button on training sessions is the real key to honing your martial arts skills. Not that any of this really matters. And that's the point. This is a Karate Kid remake. Nothing more, nothing less. I can make fun of it all I want, but that isn't going to make it more ridiculous or less pointless.

It's just proof that the remake machine in Hollywood is running out of gas. Hell, the machine's probably been running on fumes for years now. But taking 80s properties that spawned some memorable pop culture references and some forgettable sequels and then chewing them up and spitting them out into the new millennium is a new form of laziness. The people who were young enough at the time to love those movies then and feel nostalgic about them now are not going to embrace such a flimsy facsimile and, for that matter, does the Karate Kid name mean anything to today's kids?

Time will tell if such blatant remakes of such kitschy kids' flicks bear much financial fruit, but it seems safe to say that the aesthetic rewards are few. Wait, there are aesthetic rewards? No, not at all. Scratch few off the list. This is purely a cash grab, a pitiful effort to drum up some easy money from a creatively bankrupt team of producers. It's not so much that the movie is bad (it's only mildly painful to sit through), but that it has nothing to offer.

The movie's closest thing to a saving grace (even though nothing related to those two words should be considered to have anything to do with this movie) is that the location change (the remake takes place in Beijing, while the original was set in southern California) allows for some pretty postcard imagery. Ancient landmarks like the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City are seen hobnobbing with fresh additions like the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, which are still as eye-catching as they were when they wowed the world during the 2008 Olympics.

As anyone who watched those Olympics knows, Beijing looks good on camera and so it's nice to see the city's unique sights on display in a big way. But an interesting location is hardly acceptable criteria upon which to recommend a movie, so it's not like I'm suggesting that anyone check this movie out for its travelogue-y aspect alone. I'm not suggesting that anyone check this movie out at all, but at least if you do, you might be thankfully distracted during the montage sequences.

For me, that's as good as this remake gets. It's dull, uninspired, and freakishly predictable. And I don't mean it's predictable in the sense of the plot, which it is. But that's obvious, because the original movie couldn't be any more predictable and this remake is one globetrotting step away from being a carbon copy of its predecessor. So of course anyone watching this story unfold will know exactly what's going to happen. In this case, I'm willing to accept that level of predictability.

But what really gets under my skin is when each scene is layered with such obvious intentions that you can easily predict a character's reaction or movement. Director Harald Zwart feigns an attempt at occasional suspense, but you'll see every step and every glance coming long before it's arrived. That is, if you're still awake. It's tough to prevent your eyelids from drooping when a series of montages are wrapped up into one giant montage collage. But again, sleeping through those sequences means you'll never learn kung fu in approximately two hours.

It also means you'll miss the performances, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Jaden Smith has inherited some of his daddy's confident attitude in front of the camera, but no one's going to mistake the guy for a talented actor any time soon. He acts cocky and vulnerable (sometimes in the same scene!) without coming across as completely annoying, but it's all a little too cutesy and transparent. Taraji P. Henson plays Dre's mom in the movie and the role exists mainly out of necessity (it would be kind of odd if Dre were just wandering around Beijing by himself the whole time), which means she's given nothing to do except yell at her son and later cheer him on.

Jackie Chan is always fun to watch and he does get a single fight scene to remind us how uniquely balletic his martial arts moves are, but that's the extent of his moments to shine. Outside of that scene, he's just recycling his family friendly shtick that he's been doing stateside for over a decade by now. He's really there to make the montage sequences roll forward while he routinely spouts some words of wisdom. He even gets his own oft-repeated command to make all his own. In this remake, the famous "wax on, wax off" line immortalized by Pat Morita has been updated to "jacket on, jacket off" (no, I'm not making this up).

This kung fu fighting Karate Kid is a bit of a nuisance, but it's also pretty harmless. It's a dumb remake of a movie that really didn't need to be remade (but does any movie beg to be remade?) and it never really accomplishes much of anything. The fight sequences are okay and they'll probably entertain the target audience, but they're hardly commendable. The moments that are meant to be funny are mostly lame and the moments that are meant to be seriously dramatic are mostly funny. It's an inconsequential piece of fluff operating with a borrowed identity. It follows its path, rolls the credits, then offers a big shrug in explanation for what just occurred. It is what it is and that's not much. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go learn some kung fu. Cue the montage.