It was with the third film that the Karate Kid franchise really got lost. The 1984 original is a classic oppressed sports film / tale about coming of age about the bullied teenager Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) learning to defend himself with the help of the wise handyman Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita). The Karate Kid – Part II it may have been too good, but it changed things just enough to change the scenario for Okinawa and make the story more personal for Miyagi. (Also, Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from the sequel’s soundtrack? It still slaps.)
The Karate Kid Part III, however, is the kind of accompaniment that gives threequels a bad name. The film revolves around an incomplete revenge plot by John Kreese (Martin Kove), who is still upset because Daniel beat Kreese’s award-winning student Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) at the end of the first film. Where Kreese looked like a villain on a human scale – in fact, just a petty but understandable counterpoint to Miyagi – now he was an exaggerated sociopath, with no real goal but to punish Daniel and Miyagi for doing it and his dojo looks bad . And for reasons that still don’t make sense, Daniel changes his loyalty in this round of Miyagi’s philosophical and defensive teachings to something more cruel in the Cobra Kai style. It’s a terrible movie in many ways, although, I admit, things also get silly when the normal guy Daniel LaRusso is constantly having his life threatened, year after year.
Daniel and Johnny returned in 2018 with Snake Kai, an original YouTube Premium series
who skillfully reversed their roles. Now Johnny was the poor underdog (working as a handyman, no less), teaching karate to Miguel (Xolo Maridueña), a boy in his building who resembles young Daniel in many ways. Meanwhile, the real Daniel had become rich and popular and somehow ended up mentoring Johnny’s son Robby (Tanner Buchanan), as well as his own daughter Sam (Mary Mouser). The first season was a small miracle: a piece of shameless nostalgia that skillfully kept mixing and matching elements from the first film in a way that made it look, if not new, somehow full of life again after so many years away. You probably didn’t know that either Snake Kaior YouTube Premium existed at that time, which is why YouTube went out of the script originals business, and
Snake Kai The first two seasons ended on Netflix earlier this year, where subscribers hailed it as a whole new series. The next third season was made directly for Netflix and will open on January 1. The second season, for some reason, chose as a model notO Karate Kid part IIbut
Part III . Kreese returned, apparently from the dead, stealing Johnny’s Cobra Kai dojo and turning Miguel and the other students into threats. There were some charming moments here and there, especially with the expanded role of Daniel (who was a supporting character in the first season), which reminded us that Macchio’s boundless charm, like his face, has never aged entirely. Mostly, however, Kreese’s supervillain hammy took the show off balance – which in its first season was at least half-comedy, half-serious – until the whole thing culminated in a long karate fight at the high school that left Sam scarred. physical, Miguel apparently paralyzed and Robby fleeing the law. Again, it’s hard to keep that kind of story without things looking ridiculous after a while, but season two leaned straight into all of its more involuntary comic strokes, while largely abandoning the intentional humor in which Zabka had been so good at first season. Snake Kai the third year sends Daniel-san to Okinawa for a few episodes, in the process bringing back his part II love interest Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita) and his rival in that film, Chozen (Yuji Okumoto). These scenes are some of the best of the new season, especially when Daniel and Kumiko reminisce about the great and late Mr. Miyagi, with Daniel realizing that he is now the same age as Miyagi when they met in 1984. But Okinawa’s material is more an interlude – an emotional pause for Daniel, who is otherwise going through a difficult time – than a narrative for a season that still looks a lot like
Part III over.We started over a few weeks after the fight. Miguel is in the hospital, Robby is in the wind. Sam is suffering from PTSD flashbacks from his fight with Tory (Peyton List). Johnny is blaming himself for Miguel’s injury, and the school has banned martial arts entirely. Daniel, at a school board meeting where he is taking most of the blame for the fight, argues, “You don’t have to turn this into some kind of karate
uncompromised . ” Kreese, however, is still out there, and still conspiring to … well, it is unclear what his ultimate goal is, or whether he cares about anything other than sadism alone. He continues to expel students and bring in new ones in ways that raise the question of why any of the children – even Miguel’s best friend, Hawk (Jacob Bertrand), the most relentless of the ex-nerds training at Cobra Kai – would like to be around this lunatic. Several episodes feature flashbacks of a young Kreese in Vietnam
, in a way that intends to explain how he ended up like this and what is motivating him. But they’re hilarious out of place with the rest of things, as if Max Fischer’s Rushmorehad abruptly taken over as a showrunner.
This acts as a source for
Part III
the other main villain, the evil tycoon Terry Silver. The less you talk about him in that movie, the better. In addition, Kreese’s commanding officer is played by actor Terry Serpico, who has an incredible resemblance to Macchio’s 80s teenage movie star Anthony Michael Hall. This makes Serpico a confusing choice for a show that travels so much in Generation X nostalgia, as if the scenes in Vietnam were provoking a Kreese / Farmer Ted team that never really happens.
COBRA KAI (from left to right) PEYTON LIST as TORY and JACOB BERTRAND as COBRA KAI Cr. BOB MAHONEY / NETFLIX © 2020
(Left to right) Peyton List as Tory and Jacob Bertrand as Eli in ‘Cobra Kai.’ BOB MAHONEY / NETFLIX Flashbacks aside, the third season has several other inadvertently fun sequences. While looking for Robby, Johnny and Daniel not only go on a car chase, but end up fighting half a dozen goons in a chop shop, a little vigilant justice that would be absurd in this context, even without the show’s blunt stunt voice acting. for Macchio. (Zabka has always been much better at faking black belt skills than his longtime colleague. There’s also a strange replacement for Martin Kove in a late-season fight and a wide variety of martial arts skills among young actors, even those whose characters are supposed to fight the same.)
Comedy attempts have largely been abandoned, although Johnny tries some playfully unorthodox physical therapy techniques for the injured Miguel and strives to dominate Facebook to impress his high school ex-girlfriend (and Daniel, by the way) Ali (played memorably in the first film by Elisabeth Shue). The move to an essentially serious territory had extremely mixed results. Daniel and Johnny’s emotional struggles and regrets do drop, especially during the Okinawa sequels. But Kreese is a cartoon, and children are usually given only one note each, some of which are played more convincingly than others. (Jacob Bertrand seems better able to handle anything the writers throw at him, which is disappointing when it’s often just sarcastic violence.) Loyalty keeps changing not because it makes sense to any of the characters, but because the plot demands it. this constant increasingly stupid reversals. There is another fight at the end of the season involving several teenagers that is impressively filmed and choreographed, but it is so obviously criminal on their part (especially in a season that spent so much time on the legal consequences of karate fights) that it is difficult to focus on any which is not the reason anyone calls the police. The sequences are always under pressure to increase the previous edition’s bets. Up until Karate Kid Part II
did this, with a climax where Daniel and Chozen potentially battle to the death. (Spoiler: Daniel honks Chozen’s nose instead.) But the tension between the different dojos has long since crossed the line from attractively larger than life to completely ridiculous. It is a danger to continue the history of this rivalry for a long time. It is not surprising, however, that the stories of Johnny and Daniel have more depth. They have been around for longer, the actors are more experienced and the public and creators invest more in them. (By far, the strongest Miguel scene of the season, for example, is a long-awaited conversation in which he and Daniel realize how much they have in common, but it is effective almost entirely because of our decades-old movie memories. ) But they may not carry a show that is getting more and more silly everywhere else. “Sometimes,” suggests an old friend of Johnny’s at one point, “it is good to visit the past, to know where you are now. But you cannot live in the past. ”At the beginning of his execution, Cobra Kai was able to live equally well in the past and the present. Not anymore, unfortunately.