![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/kk_legends_meh.jpg\")
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While coming home from a trip, I negligently forgot to bring my iPad which serves as absolutely nothing but a glorified Kindle, and I didn\u2019t want to burn out my phone\u2019s battery utilizing the shitty plane wifi.\u00a0 However, I did remember that I had a set of wired headphones in my backpack, so I decided to actually capitalize on the in-flight entertainment and watch a movie to help chew up the flight time.<\/span><\/p>\n I ultimately landed on Karate Kid: Legends<\/em>, because it aligned pretty well with my flight time, and this was the perfect class of film that is best seen on an airplane where I\u2019m a captive audience, and I wouldn\u2019t really want to watch this on my own time at home.\u00a0 Despite the fact that I\u2019m a big fan of the Karate Kid franchise in general, just about everything about this film gave me a feeling that it probably wasn\u2019t going to be great, and as an airplane flick seemed like the most fitting place to watch it.<\/span><\/p>\n And almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the film was pretty much everything I thought it would be, this really mediocre ball of mediocrity that just barely did the absolute bare minimum of keeping my attention while feebly re-telling the tale of the Karate Kid for the umpteenth time to try and cater to another generation in spite of the fact that older iterations of the story do it just fine as long as modern viewers can get over their biases of things that appear older than them.<\/span><\/p>\n Like, the title of this post was exactly what I felt after watching Legends.\u00a0 Nobody asked for this film to be made, and if anything at all, this does a massive disservice to the Karate Kid franchise as a whole, especially after Cobra Kai<\/em> had built up so much equity after it\u2019s wildly popular run.<\/span><\/p>\n I get that following Cobra Kai is an extremely unenviable position to be in, but there was always the option to just not make anything at all, at least for a little while, so that the mood of success and victory from CK could hang around for a little bit, before releasing something to re-ignite the fanbase.\u00a0 But not only was Legends made completely unnecessarily, it was dropped in a manner of time that was frankly more detrimental to the KK universe than it would be beneficial.<\/span><\/p>\n Worst of all, it was just a severely mediocre story, even if it was mostly just a regurgitation of the original concept.\u00a0 The general linear path of a KK re-telling was entirely there; protagonist moves to a new place, meets girl, gets beat up by local martial arts practitioner, trains up, topples adversary in a tournament, gains respect.\u00a0 But the side quest of Joshua Jackson\u2019s character being the former boxer who runs a pizza joint who borrowed money from the wrong people seemed wholly unnecessary and seemingly could have been completely cut without it really impacting the story was weird to me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And then of course when Jackie Chan comes to America to guide his former pupil, it was a bit cringeworthy to how forced and obvious it would be that shocker, he just so happened to know Mr. Miyagi too and naturally they were of course friends in a life long ago, which then loops in Daniel LaRusso, thus tying together the original series to Jackie Chan\u2019s Kung Fu Kid, in the lowest of low efforts of connecting the series all together.<\/span><\/p>\n All while leveraging the set that was obviously put together on Netflix\u2019s dime for Cobra Kai, which is probably the only justifiable reason to have released this as soon as they did, so that they could utilize existing sets instead of having to rebuild any shit, years later.<\/span><\/p>\n Worst of all, for a film called \u201cKarate Kid\u201d the action in the flick was pretty disappointing.\u00a0 The main kid was a competent kung fu practitioner, but one bad scuffle and he basically abandons it for shitty Miyagi-Do style karate, before hitting paydirt when he blends the two styles together.\u00a0 But fight sequences were pretty minimal, and for those who want to actually see some martial arts action, it\u2019s massively underwhelming, with the tournament being 3-4 randos in weird alleyways, basketball courts and renovated bodegas before getting to his last boss which is on a rooftop like the last boss of the original Twisted Metal<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n The point remains, this was a film that didn\u2019t need to ever exist, but still happened anyway, which to me is the ultimate sign of a cash grab.\u00a0 And fewer things seem to support that accusation than the absolutely lackluster performances from all performers in the film, from Jackie, to Macchio, even to Joshua Jackson and even Ming-Na Wen, whom seems to be the actress with the golden touch at how she\u2019s somehow always able to get her finger into every notable franchise throughout her entire career.<\/span><\/p>\n This is where I say I\u2019m glad that I watched this on an airplane, because I\u2019d be really disappointed if I had seen this out in the real world, where I might have had a thousand other better things that I could\u2019ve done with those 90 minutes.\u00a0 But frankly, I still think I pulled the trigger on picking this one a little too preemptively, without at least seeing what other things I could\u2019ve watched on Delta in-flight alternatively, but at least I got a little inspiration to make a post about it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While coming home from a trip, I negligently forgot to bring my iPad which serves as absolutely nothing but a glorified Kindle, and I didn\u2019t want to burn out my phone\u2019s battery utilizing the shitty plane wifi.\u00a0 However, I did remember that I had a set of wired headphones in my backpack, so I decided … Continue reading Karate Kid: Legends \u2013 nobody asked for this<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[201,45,191,95,41,83,52,49],"class_list":["post-50836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-cash-money","tag-fail","tag-greed","tag-karate-kid","tag-movies","tag-observations","tag-owned","tag-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50838,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50836\/revisions\/50838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}