Karate Kid: Legends will not put anyone KO (Critique)

Coming on the success of Cobra Kai, Sony tries to relaunch the Miyagi Universe to the cinema, with this exceptionally redundant opus 2025, and saved by its exciting casting.

Please note, this film is not the conclusion of the Cobra Kai series, completed since last February on Netflix.

If Karate Kid: Legends surfs the success of the serial declination of the Miyagi Universe, this new cinematographic opus which comes out Wednesday in France is in no way the rest. This is a new story that presents Li Fong, a pupil of Kung-Fu who leaves China with his mother in the direction of New York. Lost in the Big Apple, he became friends with a classmate and his father, who manages the pizzeria from the corner of the street. But when a local karate champion decides to make him bite the dust, Li must get back to the martial arts and will be able to count on two sensei of choice …

The great find of the scenario (some will say its only find) is to bring together the iconic Daniel Larusso (Ralph Macchio), the original hero of the Kid saga – become mentor in Cobra Kai – with Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), the old sage of the 2010 remake carried by Jaden Smith (the son of Will Smith). The opportunity to merge the two combat styles, for an epic confrontation.

In this regard, the film is quite successful. Visually, Karate Kid: Legends assumes to be a dynamic entertainment that does not take the lead too much. On the screen, the choreography that mixes Kung-Fu and Karate works and the fights rival largely with those of Cobra Kai. Modern and hyper spectacular fights, filmed with a lot of style and which gives a big stroke of old to the original. Moreover, the comparison of the final scene with that of the old Kid Kid is frankly painful for the film of 1984 …

But it’s also the big problem of Kid Karate: Legends: he spends his time fighting with the past! The 2025 version never manages to detach itself from what was done before (5 films and a 6 -season series, it’s already a lot) and worse, it does not even try. It is the old recipe with mechanically applied “Rocky”, with a lazy structure to the extreme that copies and pump to the brutal dojo led by a heartless bastard. All the clichés of the genre pass there and the most damage is that the characters are well written. The newcomer Ben Wang (crossed in the American Disney series of China) is doing well from the Kimono and Joshua Jackson brings his natural relaxation in the second knife, while the two Sensei do what is expected of them.

Karate Kid: Legends could have been a nice summer film, fun and doped with beautiful Miyagi values. But as if the production did not really believe it, it bazards all in 1 hour 20 minutes, without the slightest ambition, desperately allergic to any innovation, leading to a large remix of the saga, which only seeks to operate by nostalgic chills. So many people can find their account there. And besides, the film arrives at us 3 months after its US release, where it wicked out in the tatami (barely $ 100 million in world revenue).

Stuck in a story that offers nothing new to a deductible in lack of inspiration, this new Kid Karate will not enter the legend. But who knows? Perhaps one day Aramis Knight (who plays the awful kid head to slaps that Li must fight) will have the right to his own series telling the redemption of the defeated loser, way William Zabka in Cobra Kai. Johnny Lawrence still had to wait 30 years (and the little boost of How I Met Your Mother by the way) to become the hero of history. The Karate Karate franchise will then be 70 years old and Hollywood will have given up definitively to invent new stories.

Karate Kid: Legends, by Jonathan Entwistle, released on August 13, 2025 at the cinema in France.