"Karate Kids: Legends" a soft reboot that doesn't work.

Although I don't consider them masterpieces of the seventh art, I've always had a lot of affection for all the Karate Kid films, and I even feel that the first seasons of its spin-off (Cobra Kai) were entertaining adaptations that managed to bring the formula into the 21st century, even though as the years went by things got out of hand and the narrative became increasingly sloppy.

Perhaps this is why I had quite high expectations for "Karate Kids Legends," the film directed by Jonathan Entwistle that not only promised to serve as a sort of reboot, but would also attempt to bridge the original canon of Daniel Larousse and Mr. Miyagi with the divisive story of Han and Dre (the protagonists of 2010's The Karate Kid).

Honestly, this all felt like a recipe for success, which, regardless of its quality, would at least give us the pleasure of seeing all these characters coexisting, and maybe, with a little luck, we could ignore the illogicality of having them all together.

What I'm saying in a nutshell is that my expectations for the final result, at least in terms of plot, were very low, as long as the film could provide us with pure entertainment.

Ironically, after watching it, it's pretty obvious to me that the experiment failed, and Karate Kids Legends not only fails to deliver iconic sequences, but also ends up as a hodgepodge of ideas that go nowhere, with familiar faces performing unrecognizable actions and an anticlimactic ending.

It's a cheap film that directly rejects the popcorn style of the classics, something that even the 2010 reboot captured very well.

It has a couple of strengths, such as the use of New York as a setting, and a couple of solid musical pieces that make the experience more bearable. Unfortunately, it doesn't represent the path I want for the Karate Kid franchise, a franchise that has enough potential to reinvent itself and take its concept to a genuinely interesting level.

Past iterations seem to hinder the most interesting elements of Legends, and a lot of half-baked ideas remain that may have made sense on paper, but are far from working in reality.

This score was taken from my Letterboxd account.