Karate Kid Legends review (2025)

October 11, 2025 Jeffrey Lyles Aramis Knight, Ben Wang, Jackie Chan, Joshua Jackson, Karate Kid Legends, Ming-Na Wen, Ralph Macchio, Sadie Stanley

Karate Kid Legends makes for a smooth transition from one era of the franchise to a potential new one. All while managing not to alienate old school fans whose love of the movies was rekindled with the excellent Cobra Kai TV series.

Screenwriter Rob Lieber follows the standard Karate Kid formula, but weaves in enough fresh elements to prevent Karate Kid Legends from feeling too familiar and predictable. Or as much as a sports-theme movie can avoid being predictable.

Li Fong (Ben Wang) isn’t thrilled when his mother, Dr. Fong (Ming-Na Wen, The Book of Boba Fett) announces they’re leaving Beijing and heading to New York. This means he can’t continue his king-fu training with his great-uncle, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan reprising his role from the 2010 Karate Kid reboot).

Despite the upheaval to his teenage life, Li Fong doesn’t become sullen and antagonistic to his mother — a welcome shift from the template of teen sports films. Instead, he makes friends with Mia (Sadie Stanley, The Goldbergs) the cute girl at the local pizzeria. Li “offends” Mia’s father, Victor (Joshua Jackson, The Affair) by asking for stuffed crust pizza leading to a nickname that Li can’t ditch.

In exchange for Li teaching Mia basic Mandarin, she takes Li for a tour around the city. That leads to a confrontation with Mia’s ex, Conor (Aramis Knight), the reigning champion of the Five Boroughs karate tournament.

Conor is a pretty generic bully villain and not nearly as memorable as previous Karate Kid antagonists like Johnny Lawrence or Mike Barnes. Conor trains at the karate gym/dojo operated by O’Shea (Tim Rozon). Victor is in deep with O’Shea after borrowing money from him to finance his pizza joint.

Karate Kid Legends is a brief 94 minutes, which actually hurts in this instance. There’s not enough time spent in developing Conor or O’Shea so there’s no real investment in them getting humbled and humiliated in the final act. Lieber goes an unexpected route in devoting significant time on Victor’s subplot, which leads to Li training him for his boxing comeback in order to make money to repay O’Shea.

It’s a twist on the Karate Kid formula, but it does come at the expense of time better spent on other Karate Kid Legends characters. Mr. Han makes a timely visit just as Li decides he wants to enter the tournament to confront Conor. Mr. Han puts Li through some training regiments but thinks he needs more help to have Li ready in less than two weeks’ time to win. That takes him to California where he seeks out his friend Mr. Miyagi’s prized student, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio).

This came off like a very forced way of providing a connective thread from the LaRusso-led Karate Kid trilogy to the Mr. Han installment. By the time Daniel gets incorporated into the film, he gets what amounts to an extended cameo and there’s not much insight he can provide Li. On the other hand, it is fun seeing Daniel in a brief battle against Mr. Han.

Lieber suggests there could be a little mentor rivalry playing out between Daniel and Mr. Han but given the success of Cobra Kai would have come off as an unnecessary plot point.

Director Jonathan Entwistle looks to bridge the generation gap by making Karate Kid Legends’ karate sequences more dynamic with the use of wire-fu. There’s also an abundance of quick edits and literal pop-up graphics done in a video game style counter to count up the points.

Karate Kid Legends doesn’t devote enough time on the actual tournament making it feel even more like a foregone conclusion the finals will end with Li battling Conor.

It wouldn’t have been a bad course of action to have Li deal with some challenging battles with some of the other fighters. Despite some of the rougher patches, Karate Kid Legends is entertaining thanks to the very likable cast.

Wang makes Li an easy to root for hero with good intentions and a respectful attitude even if he carries some trauma that stalled his karate training. Stanley has good chemistry with Wang while Wyatt Oleff has an enjoyable role as Li’s tutor turned best friend.

Chan and Macchio play off each other well and there is a final scene that pays homage to other aspects of the Karate Kid saga that should please fans.

An interesting aspect of Karate Kid Legends is how it opens up the possibility for future films starring Li or more of an anthology series with a new protagonist each film.