The Karate Kid (2010)

The Karate Kid is a 2010 family martial arts drama film directed by Harald Zwart. It stars Jaden Smith, Taraji P. Henson and Jackie Chan in lead roles, and it was produced by Jerry Weintraub, James Lassiter, Ken Stovitz and Jaden's parents Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. The screenplay by Christopher Murphey was from the story written by Robert Mark Kamen for the original The Karate Kid. Unlike the original, this remake is set in China, and features Kung Fu instead of Japanese-Okinawan Karate. The film's music was composed by James Horner. It is an international co-production between China, Hong Kong, and the United States.
Principal photography took place in Beijing, China, and filming began in July 2009 and ended on October 16, 2009. The Karate Kid was released theatrically worldwide on June 11, 2010 by Sony Pictures. The Karate Kid received mixed reviews and it earned $359.1 million on a $40 million budget. The plot concerns 12-year-old Dre (Smith) from Detroit, Michigan who moves to Beijing, China with his mother (Taraji P. Henson) and runs afoul of the neighborhood bully (Zhenwei Wang). He makes an unlikely ally in the form of an aging maintenance man, Mr. Han (Chan), a kung fu master who teaches him the secrets of self-defense.
== Plot ==
12-year-old Dre Parker and his widowed mother Sherry move from Detroit to Beijing after she gets a job transfer at a car factory. There, Dre meets Meiying, a young violinist who reciprocates his attention. However, Cheng, a rebellious 15-year-old kung fu prodigy whose family is close to Meiying's, keeps them apart by constantly attacking, teasing, and antagonizing Dre. As revenge, Dre throws a bucket of dirty water over Cheng and his gang after a school field trip to the Forbidden City. Enraged, they chase, corner, and brutally beat Dre at an alley. Mr. Han, a maintenance man whom Dre knew previously after doing repairs in his apartment, intervenes and fends off the bullies, revealing himself to be a kung fu master.
Han heals Dre's injuries using the ancient Chinese medicine methods of fire cupping. He explains that Cheng and his friends are not inherently bad, but are taught to be merciless to their enemies by their teacher, Master Li. Intrigued, Dre asks if Han could teach him kung fu. At first, Han refuses, but eventually accompanies him to Li's Fighting Dragons studio to make peace. Li harshly rebuffs the peace offer and challenges Dre to a fight with Cheng. Han instead counters that Dre competes against all of Li's students at the upcoming kung fu tournament. He requests that his students leave Dre alone to train until then. Li begrudgingly accepts as long as Dre shows up at the tournament.
Han begins to teach Dre kung fu by emphasizing movements that apply to life in general. He conveys that serenity and maturity, not punches and power, are the keys to mastering kung fu. Han makes Dre repeatedly take off and pick up his jacket. Through this, Dre develops muscle memory. Han takes him to a Taoist temple in the Wudang Mountains, where Dre witnesses a woman making a cobra reflect her movements and later drinks the water from a Taoist well. After many weeks of training, Han gives Dre a day off. Dre goes to see Meiying, persuading her to cut school for a day of fun. This makes her nearly late for a violin audition, which was initially supposed to be next day but was moved up, and her parents thus deem Dre a bad influence, forbidding Meiying from ever seeing him again.
Dre then heads to see Han, but finds him drunk and depressed, smashing a car he was working on. Han explains that he crashed the same car years ago, killing his wife Zhang and 10-year-old son Gong Gong. Every year, he destroys the car on the anniversary of the accident and spends the rest of the year fixing it to punish himself. Dre decides to train harder and help his teacher overcome his trauma. Han assists Dre in writing and reciting a note of apology in Mandarin to Meiying and her father, who accepts Dre's apology. In return, he said that Meiying promised to attend the tournament to support Dre and that their family never breaks their promises.
At the tournament, the under-confident Dre starts defeating all of his opponents. Enraged, Li orders Liang, one of his more sympathetic students and the least vicious of Dre's tormentors, to injure Dre in the semifinals. Liang reluctantly does so by delivering a series of crippling blows to Dre's leg. He gets disqualified as a result, and Dre advances to the finals against Cheng. Dre pleads with Han to heal his leg via the fire cupping method. Realizing this is more about overcoming Dre's fear than anything else, Han complies.
The final match starts. On Li's orders, Cheng attacks Dre's injured leg. This causes Dre to lose balance. Dre struggles but manages to get up and uses the snake stance he saw at the temple. The move is successful, and Dre catches Cheng with a kick to the head, defeating him. Dre wins the tournament, earning the respect of Cheng and his classmates. Cheng, instead of the presenter, gives Dre the trophy, and all the Fighting Dragon students bow down to Han, accepting him as their new master, leaving Li defeated.
== Cast ==
* Jaden Smith as Dre Parker
* Jackie Chan as Mr. Han
* Taraji P. Henson as Sherry Parker
* Wenwen Han as Meiying
* Zhenwei Wang as Cheng
* Yu Rongguang as Master Li
* Luke Carberry as Harry
* Shijia Lü (吕世佳) as Liang
* Ji Wang (王 姬) as Mrs. Po
* Zhensu Wu (武振素) as Meiying's father.
* Zhiheng Wang (王志恒) as Meiying's mother.
* Yi Zhao (赵 毅) as Zhuang
* Zhang Bo (张 博) as Song
* Cameron Hillman as Mark
* Ghye Samuel Brown as Oz
== Production ==
=== Development ===
A remake of the original Karate Kid entered the development in the late 2008. Variety reported at the time that the new film, to be produced by Will Smith, "has been refashioned as a star vehicle for Jaden Smith" and that it would "borrow elements from the original plot, wherein a bullied youth learns to stand up for himself with the help of an eccentric mentor". Jackie Chan told a Los Angeles Chinatown concert crowd in 2009 that he was leaving for Beijing to film the remake as Jaden Smith's teacher.
Despite maintaining the original title, the 2010 remake does not feature karate, which is from Okinawa (Japan), but focuses on the main character learning kung fu in China. Chan told interviewers that film cast members generally referred to the film as The Kung Fu Kid, and he believed the film would only be called The Karate Kid in America, and The Kung Fu Kid in China. This theory held true in the People's Republic of China, where the film is titled The Kung Fu Dream (Chinese: 功夫梦). In Japan and South Korea, the film is titled Best Kid (Japanese: ベスト・キッド; Korean: 베스트 키드) after the local title of the 1984 film in both countries.
Sony had considered changing the title of the film, but Jerry Weintraub, one of the producers, rejected the idea. Weintraub was also the producer of the original Karate Kid.
=== Filming ===
The Chinese government granted the filmmakers access to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, and the Wudang Mountains. On some occasions, the filmmakers had to negotiate with residents who were not accustomed to filming activity. The film began filming in July 2009 and ended on October 16, 2009.
== Reception ==
=== Critical response ===
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 66% based on 211 reviews, and an average rating of 6.17/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "It may not be as powerful as the 1984 edition, but the 2010 Karate Kid delivers a surprisingly satisfying update on the original". Metacritic, another review aggregator, assigned the film a weighted average score of 61 out of 100 based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, the highest of the franchise.
Ann Hornaday described Jaden Smith as a "revelation", who "proves that he's no mere beneficiary of dynastic largesse. Somber, self-contained and somehow believable as a kid for whom things don't come easily, he never conveys the sense that he's desperate to be liked. Which is precisely why The Karate Kid winds up being so likable itself". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it a positive review, rating the film three and a half out of four stars, and calling it "a lovely and well-made film that stands on its own feet". Claudia Puig of USA Today and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly each rated the film a 'B', stating "the chemistry between Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan grounds the movie, imbuing it with sincerity and poignance" and that the film is "fun and believable".
Simon Abrams of Slant Magazine gave the film one and a half stars and noted that "the characters just aren't old enough to be convincing in their hormone-driven need to prove themselves" and "this age gap is also a huge problem when it comes to the range that these kids bring to the project" and noted the portrayal of the child antagonist Cheng includes an "overblown and overused grimace, which looks like it might have originally belonged to Dolph Lundgren, looks especially silly on a kid that hasn't learned how to shave yet". Finally, Abrams noted: "What's most upsetting is Dre's budding romance with Meiying. These kids have yet to hit puberty and already they're swooning for each other".
=== Box office ===
The film was released on June 11, 2010, by Columbia Pictures to 3,663 theaters across the United States. The Karate Kid topped the box office on its opening day, grossing $18.8 million, and in its opening weekend, grossing $56 million in North America, beating The A-Team, which grossed an estimated $9.6 million on the same opening day, and $26 million in its opening weekend. It closed on September 18, after 101 days of release, grossing $176 million in the US and Canada along with an additional $182 million overseas for a worldwide total of $359 million, on a moderate budget of $40 million.
Category:2010 films
Category:Columbia Pictures films
Category:Films with asian companies and co-production
Category:Rated PG
Category:Blockbusters