Karate Kid, rebooted or recycled

I was born in 1979, and like every other 30-year-old male in the country, The Karate Kid was one of my favorite movies growing up. Pat Morita was a legend and it has always been impossible to wax my car without saying to myself "wax on, wax off." I watched it again with my son not long ago and while he didn't seem to care for it, I enjoyed it as much as when I was six years old.

I was understandably trepidatious about watching the remake, because I didn't want to see a close friend getting viciously mutilated by modern pop culture. When the trailer was released months ago, I was completely convinced that it was going to be an awful remake. I knew I didn't want to see it, and yet I knew I would end up seeing it anyway, which I did this weekend.

I am going to step aside from man-code for a moment here and say this: I was wrong.

From the previews it's clear that they made two drastic changes - the movie takes place in China, and the central character is about 4 years younger than Ralph Macchio's Daniel in the first film. Based on these changes, I expected the entire film to stray as far as possible from the original while retaining just enough to use the marketable Karate Kid title. But they didn't. Other than the obvious changes, the writers only tweaked the original story to fit the new setting. But everything that made The Karate Kid a great cheesy 80's movie has been left intact, down to the bad-guy sensei and training montage (I half-expected to hear "You're the best, around!" but I understand the need to keep things fresh for 2010).

As much as I wanted to dislike the movie, I enjoyed it. There were a few aspects I didn't like (the "jacket off" scene, which replaces wax on and paint the fence, for one) but all in all I thought it was better than the sequels and far better than The New Karate Kid, AKA the Hillary Swank turd attempt at reviving the series.