I picked up my boys early from school and took them to see The Karate Kid. Which is kind of a lie because The Karate Kid starred Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita and was actually a really good movie. This so-called Karate Kid starred Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan and was two hours and twenty minutes of raw sewage funneled through an old sweat sock.

The movie doesn’t work for far too many reasons to list in the limited space provided by the Internet, but here are a few of the low-lights:

The kids were too young. In the real Karate Kid, teenage boys beat the crap out of each other, and it was believable and bearable because teenage boys really do beat the crap out of each other like it’s a hobby. Watching a handful of 70 lb. pre-teens wailing on each other is just disturbing. And, of course, they aren’t allowed to bleed, so the fights were nothing but choreographed stunts set to loud music.

Jaden Smith can’t act.

No doubt puckering up to Will Smith’s and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s collective asses, the movie-makers spent way too much time trying to make sure Jaden looked cool. From his tightly-styled corn rows to his soulful mugging for the camera, Jaden did pretty much everything in this movie except for act.

The geography was all over the place. Once the mom and the kid are in China, you have no idea where you are in relation to anywhere else. One minute, Mr. Han seems to live in the apartment building. Another time, Jaden runs a few blocks to find him. There are no specific sets to lock onto. No Mr. Miyagi garden to walk around in and enjoy. And the school experience is a random collection of buildings, times, and days.

Apropos, it was a nice idea to set the movie in China, but a nice idea does not a movie make. The whole relocation sub-plot didn’t pass the laugh test.

Neither does the whole jacket-on, jacket-off training trick. In the real Karate Kid, the wax-on, wax off, paint-the-fence, side-to-side, sand-the-floor stuff is brilliant because it’s excellent physical training disguised as manual labor. Having Dre throw his jacket on the ground over and over for hours and then days on end is both pointless as an action and transparent as a training gimmick.

There’s a love-story shoe-horned into the plot. It doesn’t work for as many reasons as the movie itself doesn’t work. The girl is too good for Dre. He hasn’t done anything to earn her attention. And they’re both too young. There’s no sexual tension so who cares?

There’s probably a good hour or so that could have been left on the cutting room floor. And I don’t mean scenes that just don’t work. I’m talking about pointless, repetitive dialogue and long, go-nowhere interactions that browbeat us with everything we already know. We get it: The kid doesn’t like China. We get it: The kid is cooler than everyone else in the entire country. We get it: The kid gets bullied. We get it: He doesn’t like it.

Jackie Chan gets exactly one fight in the entire movie, and, although it’s quite amusing, it’s also against five scrubby children.

The real Karate Kid was a feast, laden with humor, drama, action, and soul. This piece of crap is an overpriced entrée with all the right ingredients but it’s been put together by a lobotomized monkey.

So add this to your Bucket List: “Don’t go see the new Karate Kid. Instead, rent the classic, pop some popcorn, wax on, wax off, and pray they don’t do a sequel.”

  -- Malcolm Matthews

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