MOVIE REVIEW: KARATE KID! (LEAVE COMMENTS PLEASE!!!)

The Reboot of the "Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-son series" starring Jaden Smith(Mini-Will) as Dre Parker, Jackie Chan as Mr. Han, and Taraji P. Henson Ms. Parker! The fact that Taraji is playing "Ms. Parker" is hilarious if you've ever seen the movie Friday! Anyways The film starts with our young star moving from the very American Detroit to the very foreign Beijing. As he meets a pretty Chinese girl named Meiying he gets into an altercation....well....more like an Epic Beatdown. The main adversary is named Cheng who apparently is a mega kung fu genius. I mean seriously like a small Jet Li. As the movie goes on and a love story develops and the local kids make Dre pay for even saying hello to Meiying. Dre takes some pretty bad hits in this film but all it does is draw you into the film even more! The training was a good fresh theory as opposed to just doing "Wax on Wax off" again.

The film goes through some Chinese culture as well as some great little comedy inserts that channel Will Smiths same persona on film through is sons personality. I loved the drama that the kids built with the bully aspect, I also loved the training montages, I even loved the explantion of Mr. Hans past little by little. The boy honestly has skills after really getting to train with Jackie as well!!

There is some drama about the movie being title Karate Kid and he is taught Kung-Fu but if the called it The Kung-Fu Kid and released it people would call it a rip off. So as it is....you cant make everone happy. There is also the Street Fighter scoreboard counter that I hated in the ending fights and a little bit of slow motion rope work involved in the final fights. Still kept me intrigued to the very end.

WARNING- This movie is about two and a half hours long! I barely noticed but just to give a heads-up to plan ahead.

I give this movie a All Ages, Edge of your seat rating that I welcome to the Karate Kid (or shall I say Kung-Fu Kid?) franchise!. Great job to the kids and I look forward to seeing the talented Jaden Smith in his next role! (Hopefully he doesnt have Bow Wow's agent.