Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

The sixth entry in a franchise that has now outlived two of its own reboots, Karate Kid: Legends arrives bearing the weight of continuity, nostalgia, and a Beijing kung fu prodigy named Li Fong who is relocated to New York after a family tragedy. The setup is serviceable. Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio share the screen for the first time, and the film asks us to watch two martial traditions merge into one, which it does with the solemnity of a treaty signing. The casting is diverse, with a Chinese lead, a Chinese-American mother, an African-American schoolteacher, and a supporting ensemble that reflects the actual demographics of the borough it depicts. None of this is announced. It simply is. That is the more elegant approach, and the film deserves credit for not turning its own ensemble into a press release.

Where the film engages with cultural identity, it does so through the immigrant experience of a boy caught between his mother's grief and his own. The script treats this as personal growth, not as a thesis. A loan shark named O'Shea menaces a pizzeria owner, and the debt subplot gestures at economic desperation without ever building a case against capital. The women in the film are a love interest and a working mother, both handled with competence and neither asked to carry an argument. There is no romance beyond the conventional, no identity beyond the stated, no sermon delivered from the mountaintop.

What remains is a martial arts film that respects its own rituals. The mentorship dialogue about discipline and fear is the standard register of the genre, delivered with a straight face and no evident desire to instruct the audience on how to live. It is a modest, well-mannered production. The final scene, in which two middle-aged men debate pizza regionalism and pitch a dojo-themed restaurant, suggests a film comfortable with its own silliness. The social consciousness on display is real but gentle, present in the faces on screen and absent from the script's intentions. We classify it accordingly and move on.