My assumption about the mom’s job was that it was military-related, given that so many of the other students at Dre’s school were caucasian.
I took the little girl to see it and we both really enjoyed it. As a huge fan of the Original and the sequel I wasn’t sure if this would measure up… but young Jaden was very compelling.
I made my daughter watch the first and second prior so she would have a frame of reference. I think besides the excellent performance of Jaden and Jackie Chan… the bully Cheng…was GREAT. That kid was compelling… he was very charismatic as well as scary… those eyes…
BTW what a great movie to inspire tourism to China… they made the country look wonderful…
The countryside is. Shanghai is nice. All of the sights and old buildings are also nice. But a lot of it looks more like this, falling apart with junk floating in the water, or just humongous, concrete, mass-produced apartment buildings with zero life nor artistic merit. As a tourist, you probably won’t really go back behind the main street to see all of that, admittedly.
Just watched it, and yes, there were people applauding in the cinema. I didn’t watch the first one so I don’t have a frame of reference. It has some of the better martial art scenes since the “shake the camera so badly that everyone has a headache” cliche that seems to take hold of some filmmaker. You can see the blocks and the take-downs; if it is choppy, well, it is supposed to be.
The ending was…well, rather abrupt. Yeah, they won! So did the girl make it to the academy? What happened to the evil teacher? Did he learn humiity? I was half-expecting a bunch of Shaolin monks to break in and give him a harsh lashing on the tenets of honour and respect, or having Mr.Han wiping the floor with him (though seeing how Mr. Han tensed up at the martial art school earlier suggested to me he wouldn’t fight unless he had to).
The bullying part went on too long, and as some has mentioned, no basis. However, that how real bullies tend to work; they pick one someone who is new, lonely and scared of you. However, the fact that Dre was bullied kept being in rubbed in. Nice touch of actually having a teacher noticing that something might be wrong.
Closing comments: Jackie Chan seemed to have improved as an actor. As for the kid, he came across an immature brat who has no sense of time and place to someone who was trying to be less self-centred.
Until they punch you and throw you around…
Hanyu Piyin.
Well, they can’t all be speaking English - that will get more complaints. The tour guide is expected to speak in English…when you are leading a group which include foreginers. In fact, it is a pretty realistic protrayal of adjusting to new culture and places; the only wallbanger is Dre insisting on speaking English to people who obiviously couldn’t understand and answer him.
Maybe that’s the ‘dishonor part’ which he was referring to later.
In Japan and from the look of it, China, there are ‘ddr-like’ games where they mount motion sensors on corners of the ‘stage’ which detect your motion. Like DDR, you have to wave your hand or feet under the sensor to match the timing of the arrows. This gives you the flexibility to dance in any ways you want, as long as you match the timing, though what they did in the movie is a little too over the top and ‘natural’
What I like about the scene is that Mr. Han is defintely exerting himself and has to fight the urge to hit back, instead of being some serene zen-master. It’s the variant of using the enemy’s strength against himself, so if the enemy tries to whack you force of x, he gets hit back with a self-inflicted force of x.
I didn’t catch that. What I get is that the Chinese girl’s parents were close friends with Cheng’s parents (first part of the movie, when Dre asked if Cheng likes her and she said they are neighbours). After Dre was told he couldn’t be friend with her anymore, Cheng and his gang walked up haughitly. It implied to me that Cheng and Co. have been spreading bad stories about Dre to the girl’s parents.
Second, he dragged the daughter off away from home to have fun for the whole day before an important audition, and it seems that the parents were strict about her being home by then.
Third, it is just Chinese culture that it’s not proper for girls to associate with hooligans. And Dre does come across as one. (Thoguht his does rise unfortunate implications about Cheng, and girl’s parents and Cheng’s parents being next door neighbours…)
This I agree, though not having lived in Beijing or been there, I have no idea how far a part of the Great Wall is to the urban areas. But you defintely do not need to conduct running lessons on the Great Wall.
The Wudang mountains sequences are pretty jarring too. Nothing really happened there besides the final ‘cobra-stance trance’ and the part of the water, which could be done with any old well in any village up any high mountain…
A little belated, but I saw it tonight. The original is still kind of a cheesy, sentimental pleasure to me like it was to a lot of of people who were teenagers at that time.
I had no huge objections to anything. The kids were younger, yes, but the bullies were supposed to be scary to a 12 year old, not to an adult, and bullies can be terrifying at that age.
Jackie Chan was better than he had to be and handled the emotional scene in the car perfectly. I never knew the guy could really act.
My nitpicks are minor. I agree with those above that “wax on, wax off” is way better than, “jacket on, jacket off,” and I wanted to hear Survivor doing that " Best Around" song during the tournament montage.
The violin in the fountain made me cringe a little too, but I was even more taken aback that after all that running and swinging it around in the case, the girl was able to take right out and play it with out tuning it at her audition. That thing would have been way out of tune.
That particular picture of China was something we haven’t seen much of in movies either – that modern community of encroaching westerners – and I didn’t mind the scenery porn at all. maybe it wasn’t necessary to train on the Wall, but it sure was pretty to look at.
They cut school, and then when the father went to pick her up she was not there and he had to wait.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. I’ve only seen about the last half of the original on TV, but I’ve seen a thousand young boy gets a mentor a grows up movies. I liked this one. The people were all fallible, and the homesickness and heartache were all well done. The very different culture was also very well done, and I really liked how they mixed English and subtitles. I wish that they had been a bit more daring and had Dre make more efforts at Chinese. I liked how Mr. Han learned some things from Dre too: like facing his fears and regrets.
I had to see this movie, even if it was a crapfest, because I’m a huge fan of the original, so I couldn’t not go see this one. Having said that, I was okay with this version, even pleased. It won’t be remembered in 25 years like the other first one, but it was a fun. As usual, the trailer gave away a good bit of the good bits, not all, but many.
Jaden is pretty annoying sometimes, and the script let him prattle more than I wanted to hear. Having said that, the actor did a good, even very good job with the part. Chan was also good. And, yeah, that fight against the 13-year-olds had Chan’s fingerprints all over it, re the the comic flourishes.
On the car thing – I gather that that VW was the actual car that Han’s family was killed in; did Han spend each year fixing it up, only to destroy it on June 8 and start over? Endless atonement, endless futility?
The voice of Cheng bothered me a lot for some reason. I was probably overestimating his age, but his voice sounded much younger than he looked and didn’t fit him for most of the movie. Was another actors voice dubbed onto his? Maybe I was just hearing the usual ADR strangeness that happens in movies.
Saw it last night, and here are my two cents:
The Good:
I liked the 12-year-old angle. It seemed more real than the Cobra Kai and Daniel Russo, who looked like he was 17 going on 30.
This movie was very beautiful, with China almost being a character. The moving from NJ to California in the first one didn’t make the main character much of an outcast in my mind. The China setting and the language barrier really drove home the alienation of the main character.
Jackie Chan actually acted tired and in pain after his altercations - a nice touch.
Jaiden and Jackie both did better jobs of acting than I anticipated.
The Kung Fu was beautifully done.
The Bad:
No real surprises - plot point to plot point copy of the original.
The main bully wasn’t convincing. He seemed to young and baby-faced to be menacing, and there were other older boys in his gang that looked much more frightening. (Course, the blond Cobra Kai surfer dude in the original didn’t make me quake with fear, either.)
It wasn’t as funny as the original, it needed a few more tension breaking lines like in the original.
The pacing was off. Getting the story started seemed to take forever.
The ???:
The DDR dance - was it supposed to be sexy? I didn’t really get what it was doing there?
The mother seemed to swing from helicopter mom to absentee parent. What, no questions after the kiss?
The scenes were beautiful, but they must have travelled over 2/3rds of China to practice Kung Fu in beautiful places with no people.
Overall, I enjoyed it, and I think that Jaiden Smith has a lot of potential.
Superhal said:
No it wasn’t, but it was glossed over. The reason they picked on Dre was because he started talking to the girl. I got the impression Cheung liked the girl, and was jealous. There could have been a racial angle, but they didn’t play that up.
The only reason this works at all is because they were mostly afraid of their instructor, and when he started doing dishonorable things, that made them question his leadership. But it still felt hokey to me.
StGermain said:
It certainly felt like a special school and had several westerners (the blond boy who disappears after the fight on the playground until showing up at the end).
He talked the girl into skipping out of school and violin practice - on the day before her big audition. Then they found out it was moved up one day, so he caused her to be late and almost miss the audition. That made the family look bad - “You’re daughter was late and not dressed properly”.
That was actually in Karate Kid 2. It was the set up for the conclusion of KK2.
Kimstu said:
As a former cellist, I still cringed. And my cello had a zip up cloth cover and I still took it out in the rain, doesn’t mean I would want to stand in a fountain with it.
Crowbar of Irony +3 said:
That was Dre refusing to cooperate. “You can make me come to China, but I refuse to learn Chinese. Take that.”
The Second Stone said:
Even with the training, it was only at the end of the film he was making any concessions to staying in China. That’s why the scene with him apologizing to the father in Chinese was important - that was part of his acceptance. Before that, his unwillingness to learn Chinese was part of his rebellion.
squeegee said:
That was the impression I got.
Reloy3 said:
Being a bully isn’t just about size or appearance. It’s mostly about attitude. He didn’t have to be the biggest or the ugliest kid, just the one with the strongest personality. He was the star pupil from the school, the others followed him.
I think a lot of kids that seemed frightening to us when we were 12 would probably seem like harmess little punk kids to us now.
I think Irishman is exactly right with that. It wasn’t necessarily the biggest kids that were the scariest or most menacing. Some kids just have a mean streak to them and an intimidation factor, and this was a kid who also was well trained in kung fu (even though Mr. Han would say it wasn’t real kung fu). I didn’t have trouble buying him as someone who would be scary to a 12 year old kid in a strange country.
Incidentally, there was no karate in the movie at all, so what was the point of retaining that exact title? They could have easily changed it to The Kung Fu Kid and I don’t think it would have hurt ticket sales.
Diogenes the Cynic said:
The kid pounded his face in on their first confrontation. That’s pretty menacing.
As I understand it, “The Karate Kid” is a marketing paradigm. They wished to retain the title to retain the connection. Would it really make a difference to sales to change it to The Kung Fu Kid? Maybe not, but Hollywood doesn’t always work logically. From their perspective, it isn’t worth the risk.
I thought I saw in promo material a reference to Dre having studied karate from his uncle in America, and so in the first fight trying to use karate against them - bad karate at that. There was supposed to be a line calling him “the karate kid” in a mocking tone. I didn’t see that in the movie. It might have been edited out during post-production. The producers might have felt it would cast karate as inferior and that would generate some ill-will or bad publicity or something. The end result is that the name does not fit and seems wrong. Hasn’t hurt ticket sales, though.