‘The Karate Kid’ or — A Nice Little Balancing Act?

So ‘The Karate Kid’ (1984) is about a young boy who wax off in front of an elderly Japanese man?

Causal flippancy aside, it was really good fun getting to finally check out a film I’d never seen before but had, obviously, heard of for years. It’s a charming and quite lovely tale about Daniel who must face down his lions (or cobras in this case) and learn to stand-up for himself. In the process both he and his teacher, Mr Miyagi, find a surrogate in each other — Daniel needs a father figure and Miyagi could do with someone to care for, to love.

I knew the story (roughly) and what to expect but there were two big surprises ‘The Karate Kid’ had hidden up its karategi that I wasn’t expecting: the first is that it’s over two hours long; the second is that there is hardly ANY karate in this film at all! Sure, there’s a few skirmishes near the start but very little karate fights. In fact, as the film goes on, there’s even less karate with the bulk of the movie concentrating on the relationship between Daniel and Miyagi and the fact that karate is not about violence. Like Daniel himself I was sitting there thinking “When’s he going to teach him some actual moves?”

Of course it’s all building up to a deliberate “Ah ha!” moment when everything that Miyagi has been teaching Daniel clicks into place, and it’s immensely satisfying when it does. It’s also a good way of putting the kid through karate training without relying on a martial arts montage or other potential clichés. As the film went on I was actually glad there wasn’t much karate action going on as I was more than happy simply hanging out with these two friends, especially as Ralph Macchio has such an easy going and likable personality.

The two hour run-time helps too, allowing the film to have a nicely unhurried pace; I felt quite relaxed watching this movie. My dread was that ‘The Karate Kid’ was going to be nothing but posturing, evil gangs, machismo bullshit and punchy-punchy action and although I’m up for that it would’ve made the film silly and in danger of missing any point it was trying to make.

Yet that does lead to my only slight criticism which is that I wanted a little more Martin Kove as John Kreese who makes an excellent bad guy (I love the photo he has of himself in full military garb and a gun on his dojo wall). I was expecting Kreese to pop-up more often, maybe a few cut-away scenes of him telling his team of his evil plans etc, but he kinda drops out for most of the film only to reappear at the end for the climax. But, again, having him doing his villainous thing throughout would’ve made the film silly and Mr Miyagi would’ve scolded me for suggesting such a notion.

‘The Karate Kid’ is great. It’s got a decent message about, well, decency and perseverance and even if the Cobra Kai’s are a little one dimensional as baddies (they’re bad and dress in black) the focus is really about Daniel and his sensei. It’s rather nicely filmed too with a very pretty crane shot (appropriately enough, I guess considering) when Miyagi gets Daniel to hit him, the Sun behind them as the camera pulls back and up.

Not as action packed as I was expecting but, then again, that wasn’t a bad thing resulting in a pleasantly absorbing movie and, after all, karate is not about violence. Although tell that to Bruce Lee.