Spun Off: KARATE KID: LEGENDS and BALLERINA

If you’re looking for the second remake of an 80s movie, or a legacy sequel to an 80s series, or a sequel to a streaming show spun off from that series, or a sequel to a 2010 remake of an 80s movie that reveals that the original and the remake were in the same canon all along, well, here’s Karate Kid: Legends. It’s all of the above at once. It follows a new martial arts youngster (Ben Wang), a Chinese teen studying under Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han. (His prior student, Jaden Smith, goes unmentioned.) The boy moves with his mother (Ming-Na Wen) to New York City. There he promises his mom he won’t get into fighting. But would you believe there’s a pretty girl (Sadie Stanley) at his school whose ex-boyfriend (Aramis Knight) works out at a dojo and challenges him? Well, this is a Karate Kid movie after all. A fun wrinkle is that the girl’s father (Joshua Jackson) is an ex-boxer and the kid trains him, too, in hopes of winning a match and saving a struggling pizzeria. That’s an unexpected move. Still, the movie’s a five car pile-up at cliche station. Every plot thread proceeds exactly as you’d expect, right down to Chan, given only one brief, darkly lit action moment, calling in Ralph Macchio, fresh from the series finale of Cobra Kai, to assist in making this Karate Kid ready to fight in the Big Tournament against the bully. And the movie moves so quickly that it really can’t service all of the tropes it whips up. A tighter focus on the boy might’ve worked better, in that it could put more depth to the cardboard types it throws up around him. He’s likable enough, and the movie’s efforts to be a simple little teen drama are its best moments. There could be something there. Instead, we have a light, slight movie filmed with a minimum of fuss in bright, quick scenes that maneuver a handful of pleasant predictable elements into place for their foregone conclusions while managing the nods and winks toward the larger franchise.

If you’re looking for a spinoff that’s also a quasi-sequel set between two other sequels in an ongoing contemporary action series, well, here’s Ballerina. All of the marketing makes sure to append From the World of John Wick to the title in order to make sure we know what to expect. Set between Chapters 3 and 4 of that Keanu Reeves’ vengeful hitman franchise, this picture introduces Ana de Armas as an orphan trained by Anjelica Huston to become a ballerina assassin. Or is it assassin ballerina? Regardless, the movie is about how she wants revenge on the organization that murdered her father, and thus sends herself into elaborate action of the John Wick kind. What follows are the typical elaborate sequences in which bones are broken and heads are splattered in rhythmic and gymnastic ways. There’s some cleverness here. I especially liked a shootout in an icy neon club in which people go slipping and sliding. There’s also, later, a fun action sequence we discover in retrospect as she walks through the aftermath only to end up in the start of another as she exits the building. The whole thing is a bit deadening, though, in the way the lesser Wicks can be. All the endless shooting gallery stuff is repetitive past a certain point, and the gleeful gore becomes so routine as to be vaguely alienating and off-putting. The plotting here also stretches credulity with dopey twists and a setting in increasingly insular assassin circles until literally every character on screen is a force for violence. When everyone on screen is a killer, then the dangers of action spilling out over a small European mountain village lose their edge. Director Len Wiseman gives it all a phony sheen that does nothing to pump the stakes, and, though De Armas is a compelling presence, the movie never quite makes her stand out from any other anonymous killer. Worst is when she’s put up against Wick himself in scenes that remind us of better movies and which I frankly did not understand in the context of the others in the series. He paused between when to do what? Maybe you need to love the other entries more, or less, to get it.