Awful, awful, awful

I’m excited to see what last remnants of the “Karate Kid” franchise “Cobra Kai” incorporates into its last season but if they do bring on Hillary Swank in any capacity, I think she should just play Hillary Swank.


That she resuscitated her career after this turd makes for far better mythologizing than anything in “Next Karate Kid”, which has her playing an angry 17 year old named Julie. Her parents have died and she lives with a grandmother who just so happens to be the wife of a friend of Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita). In Boston to accept a war medal, Miyagi takes the girl on his wing with predictable and so much less rewarding results.


What’s happening with Daniel-San is never mentioned, but it’s still more fun to think about than anything regarding Julie, a sullen, whiney brat who has awkward expository exchanges like this one when Grandma gets her name wrong- “My is Julie. My mother’s name was Susan. She was killed in a car accident with my father and they’re both dead. So stop trying to bring them both back.” But Julie is really only a montage away from finding inner tranquility and spouting fortune cookie wisdom; the heart that made the first movie the classic it is is treated almost as an afterthought by screenwriter Mark Lee.


For some reason Lee is more interested in what’s going on at Julie’s high school, where a patrol of fascistic para-military, I don’t what you call them, hall monitors, maybe? They study hand to hand combat under a psychotic gym instructor (Michael Ironside) who urges his charges to subdue any student who gets in their way. How, you ask? At one point, I shit you not, a kid is nearly taken out with a car bomb?


Along the way she also falls for another student, who looks like a late 1980’s Tom Berenger, as opposed to some of these military kids, who also look much older and jacked up then your usual High School student. The hook here is that now Miyagi is teaching a girl and this..doesn’t turn into much of a hook at all. She refuses to wax but that’s about the key difference. Also, Miyagi goes dress shopping for her and when it’s time for her to learn how to dance for her prom, he shows her how easy it is to go from karate movements to doing a waltz. That’s right, a waltz! The dance that happens at every prom in modern times.


Padding out the run time even more, Miyagi takes her to a monastery filled with some of the goofiest dancing, mugging, and even bowling monks ever put to film. He also has to beat up random hillbilly jerks and we all know that a final showdown is coming with you know who. Soon Swank’s put-on enthusiasm for jumping and high kicking starts to feel as unctuous as her excessive whining is annoying, and Morita can only add so much gravitas to this shitstorm of heavy-handed, senseless, god-awful plotting.


When Miyagi just suddenly becomes Julie’s sole caregiver I knew we were in trouble but then when the military kids suddenly crash their own prom by bungee jumping off the rafters in the ceiling I knew we were dealing with a special kind of oddness in film- the kind where every character does things by pulling them from their asses rather than from any kind of actual, recognizable human thought. It’s sad that this was Morita’s last go-round. Miyagi deserved infinitely better.