The 2010 reboot of 1984’s The Karate Kid took a new kid from the U.S. to China to be trained in martial arts by Jackie Chan. Karate Kid: Legends reverses the process; our teenaged hero is reluctantly dragged from Beijing to New York.
Played by Ben Wang, Li Fong is the son of a doctor (Ming-Na Wen) with a family tragedy in his past. When we first see him, he’s living, and training in Kung Fu, at the school of his Uncle Han (Jackie Chan). Mom doesn’t want him fighting, so she pulls him out of the school to live in Manhattan. He promptly meets a friendly girl, Mia (Sadie Stanley) at the local pizza shop; he also meets her bullying jerk of an ex (Aramis Knight), who happens to be a local martial arts champ. Mia’s ex-boxer dad Victor (Joshua Jackson) is in debt to a loan shark who runs the jerk boyfriend’s school.
The various villains, goals and obstacles thus hurriedly shoved into place, the stage is set for a big showdown between Li and the jerk at a citywide elimination tournament. Before that, of course, comes extended sequences in which he’s trained not only in Kung Fu by Chan’s Uncle Han, but in “Miyagi Karate” by Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), the title character from the ’84 film, still carrying on Miyagi’s legacy in California. (The movie comes up with some belated backstory claiming an ancient link between the Japanese Miyagi and the Chinese Han.)
Directed by Jonathan Entwistle from a script by Rob Lieber, this is pretty basic stuff, dramatically speaking. But the young leads have a sweet rapport, and the fan service of linking the old film series with the reboot is warmly received; Macchio’s first appearance here got a round of applause from the audience with whom I saw the film. Most importantly, the movie features Jackie Chan, one of the great movie stars of all time, in a relaxed emeritus role. We don’t get to see much of him in action here, but he seems to enjoy working in friendly rivalry opposite Macchio. And there’s a scene in which Li takes on some thugs in an alley in which young Wang seems to be channeling Chan’s desperate, hanging-on-by-a-thread comic style. I had to wonder if Chan had a hand in the choreography.
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It’s pointless to complain that the action sequences in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning are preposterous. They are, of course, but if they weren’t, the audience would presumably feel cheated. It’s what this franchise is about – wildly exaggerating the stamina, adroitness and durability of which humans are capable.
Or, rather, of which one particular, superior human is capable: Tom Cruise, as hero Ethan Hunt. Toward the end, Ethan crawls around outside the cockpits of two different biplanes – changing planes in mid-flight! – to grapple with the bad guy (Esai Morales). It’s one of the more spectacular airplane stunt sequences since the finale of 1977’s Capricorn One, but it makes the Marvel movies seem like gritty realism by comparison.
Mind you, by this time we’ve already seen Ethan enter a wrecked Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to retrieve some gizmo; he needs it stop a rogue AI program from launching a nuclear holocaust, so no pressure. He then rises to the surface without a wetsuit.
And it isn’t just his physical prowess, of which, at 62, Cruise can be justly proud. Ethan is also morally superior. Canoodling with his leading lady (Hayley Atwell) in the decompression chamber after his arctic dip, he asks what human could be trusted with the power to control the world’s nuclear arsenals, and the wide-eyed, worshipful woman unhesitatingly suggests that he’s just the right guy. Ethan demurs, all modesty.
It’s been a while since a star has treated himself to quite this shameless a Stations of the Cross tour. The opening credits announce this eighth film in the series as “A TOM CRUISE PRODUCTION,” and the producer certainly shows reverence for his leading man.
But as usual when he plays one of his hyperconfident man of action roles – he can be excellent when he plays desperate, out of his depth pipsqueaks, as in Rain Man or A Few Good Men – at some level I can’t take Cruise seriously, despite his obvious great capabilities. He’s youthful in the wrong sense onscreen; other stars – say, Henry Fonda or James Stewart – had a boyishness which they never lost, even as they added the gravitas of maturity. But try as he might, Cruise always comes across like a kid dressed up in his dad’s clothes.
To be fair, this movie and its predecessors aren’t really any sillier than most episodes of Bruce Geller’s Murphy’s-Law-defying TV series (CBS; 1966-1973). But that show played it cool and laconic, with long, dialogue-free sequences of sneaky spy mischief, propelled by quiet, tense, repetitive musical cues and almost no backstory. The movies are loaded with heaving psychodrama and bombastic music and extended fight and chase scenes, often featuring Cruise doing his adorable little stiff-armed, wind-up-toy run, right up the middle of a conveniently empty road.
It’s certainly fair to complain that Final Reckoning, which clocks in just a little shy of three hours, is way too long and drawn out. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a script he wrote with Erik Jendresen, the movie is exceedingly well-made on a scene-by-scene basis. But cumulatively, it’s too much, and with its heavy, Gotterdammerung atmosphere and plot elements that recall movies like Fail Safe and WarGames, it’s a little lacking in humor, too.
There is excellent acting here. Angela Bassett brings a moving authority to the role of an intelligent, decent, responsible President of the United States. The French actress Pom Klementieff is amusing as an assassin turned ally; Katy O’Brian from Love Lies Bleeding makes an impression as a Navy diver, and vets like Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Janet McTeer, Rolf Saxon and Nick Offerman, among others, are always welcome.
But the audience is probably most grateful to Simon Pegg, who works hard to lighten things up. And Lucy Tulugarjuk, even though her lines are in an Inuit language, connects with the audience pretty much every time they cut to her.
One last snarky shot at a fellow sexagenarian who is possibly holding up better than I am: For all the care lavished on the film in general and the star in particular, Cruise’s hair somehow got away from the filmmakers here. It’s long, and it seems limp and spiritless; at times it gives him almost a Shemp Howard look. When he’s struggling to hang on to the airplane and his face and hair are rippling in the wind, it offers the only other significant laughs in Final Reckoning, albeit likely not on purpose.
