There’s a lot riding on Li Fong, warrior protagonist of the Karate Kid: Legends. The Beijing émigré (played by Disney mainstay Ben Wang) is barely settled into his new Manhattan surrounds when he finds himself schooling Victor, a West Side pizzaiolo (Joshua Jackson), in the ways of kung fu to help him win a boxing purse and clear his debt with an unfriendly neighborhood loan shark (Tim Rozon). But when Victor is cheated out of a certain win by an illegal knockout blow, Fong is reminded of the tragic death of his kung-fu idol older brother, and his frozen reaction in the moment puts him at odds with Victor’s daughter Mia, an emerging love interest (Sadie Stanley), and his own mother (Ming-Na Wen), who explicitly forbade him from fighting.
Besides acing the SAT and fitting into a new high school, Fong is further charged with reinvigorating a cultural institution attempting its first feature film reboot in 15 years. Inferior franchises have buckled under lesser pressure. All of it had the makings of a disaster recipe for director Jonathan Entwistle. But Rob Lieber’s script embroiders those plot points on to a classic underdog story that feels even more resonant at a time when young people appear to be more lonely and powerless than ever. Sure, longtime Karate Kid watchers will see many of Legends’ punches coming, but there’s vastly more enjoyment to be taken from watching the film with young viewers who are either coming into the Karate Kid world fresh or from Netflix’s Cobra Kai TV series spinoff. (Kids ruled my screening of the film in Atlanta, where many of the exterior and street scenes in Legends were shot.)
