The presence of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith as producers of the new remake of The Karate Kid tells it all. You can almost hear the meeting where the idea was hatched, with Will Smith doing the talking:
"Sure, it's a classic but there's a whole generation or two that never saw the original. My son Jaden is exactly the right age. And instead of setting it in L.A., with suburban teens beating each other up, we'll move the whole thing to China and up the ante: Jaden against a gang of Chinese kids who were practically born knowing kung fu. But even though Jaden will be learning kung fu, we'll still call it The Karate Kid because that's the brand that we're selling. Oh - and since it's in China, we can cast Jackie Chan for international appeal - and that's not to mention a built-in audience of billions in China. And oh yeah, why not expand it to almost two-and-a-half hours so we can fit in a couple of extra subplots and a lot of travelogue footage of the Forbidden City and the Great Wall and all that Olympic stuff in Beijing?"
Geez -- I feel greasy just thinking about this. This remake of The Karate Kid is filled with buckets of sentimentality and a fortune-cookie factory's worth of trite aphorisms. Yet there's barely 90 minutes of story to fill the bloated running time. It's the same simple Rocky knock-off, with a couple of extra subplots thrown in -- and the pre-teen equivalent of violence-porn.
Indeed, there's something unsettling, even creepy, about the big kung-fu tournament toward which the whole film builds. In the original Kid, the characters were teen-agers - and the tournament fighting didn't have the tang of bloodlust that every single fight scene in this movie carries. But these characters are pre-teens, for the most part - and they fight like they're trying to emulate the violence of the more graphic martial-arts video games. It might as well be a pre-adolescent tough-man competition.
That's true early on as well, when young Jaden Smith, as an American transplant named Dre Parker, gets his ass kicked by the same kids he'll eventually face in the climactic tournament. Except this encounter happens on a concrete playground and the kid kicks the crap out of Dre, then does it again later.