Day 156 - Karate Kid



Day 156          The Karate Kid [2010]

                          
Screenplay                    Christopher Murphey
Based on                       ‘The Karate Kid’ by Robert Mark Kamen
Director                         Harald Zwart
Cinematography            Roger Pratt
Music                            James Horner
Leads                            Jaden Smith, Jackie Chan, Taraji P. Henson, Wenwen Han, Zhenwei Wang, Yu Rongguang
Production                     Columbia Pictures

IMDb                                6.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes                65%

Ok ok ok! I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I should have watched the original Karate Kid first. But sometimes it’s better not to do a review that is just a comparison. I think this is a re-imagining of the original karate kid. It’s based around a single mother (Henson) and her son Dre (Smith) who move to Beijing. Dre gets bullied at school and wants to learn Karate/Kung-Fu so that he can beat his bullies (to be honest I missed the first ten minutes of the film so I’m not sure whether he was already into Karate). He couldn’t have picked a better coach than Jackie Chan, stuntmeister general. Not only can he do martial arts, he also knows how to star in fairly average Hollywood movies. This was Jaden Smith hot off the tear-jerking Pursuit of Happyness, back when he was all cute and cuddly before puberty and fame got the better of him. He’s not bad but the film is. It’s one of those film that is for a general audience. I hope the kids enjoyed it because I’m not sure the adults would have done, full of cliché and probably reference to the original I just got bored pretty quickly. I thought the stunts and martial arts were good, but that’s why you pay for Jackie Chan. Can I also ask what the hell happened to the white guy Dre kind of befriends at the start and then we don’t see again?

Acting                              2 / 4
Writing                          1.5 / 4
Cinematography               3 / 4
Music                               2 / 4
HWF rating               1.5 / 4

Comments