The Karate Kid
Saw this with my parents the other day. Thought it’d make a good Father’s Day flick, since both me and my dad are closet (or not-so-closet maybe) Jackie Chan fans and we’ve both seen the original. He also reacted positively to the trailer when we went to see… uh… oh, How To Train Your Dragon.
Summation? I quite liked it! Sure there wasn’t a whole lot in terms of originality, when compared to the original… but I thought it was an incredibly decent remake overall. Moving the film to China made a lot of sense and gave the filmmakers a lot of awesome scenic stuff to shoot, that’s for sure. :P
There was a great amount of humor balanced with a fair amount of drama and tension and action. You could definitely tell that Jackie Chan’s team had most of the say in terms of choreography, as I saw a lot of throwbacks to his original Chinese films, especially in the early chase scene.
I suppose I might complain about the camera work when it came to the fighting scenes; there was too much jolting and jilting around that you couldn’t always make out the movement of the characters so well. Obviously this is deliberate, but I know that at least in Chan’s older films, they kept the camera still as often as not, just because his motions were so impressive to watch without the extra ‘dynamism’ of a wobbly camera.
My mother thought the scenario was unrealistic; she didn’t think a bunch of Chinese kids would dare strike an African American. But I rather think that kids are kids, no matter what color or creed.
I’ve read a lot about how people are annoyed or offended at the idea that Jaden’s parents are uh… so well situated to boosting their kid into the limelight. And while that’s certainly true, I have to say that I can’t really complain when he does a pretty decent job of holding up to the standards set to him. He looked pretty good doing all his own fighting; apparently he trained for months with Jackie Chan’s stunt coordinator.
It was also pretty amazing to see Jackie Chan in a dramatic role. Again, referring to his older films… they had plotlines, but the acting was pretty hammy in general. So seeing him as this sort of desperately broken, widowed husband was an incredible shock. I totally cried. >_>
Anyway! I enjoyed myself greatly and that’s about as much as I would have asked of it. (And my Dad gave it an “A+”.) Plus it was the first film I hadn’t seen in 3D for a while now. XP
