THE STUDENT BECOMES THE TEACHER

Karate Kid: Legends, the latest instalment to the franchise that spawned from the 1984 team of Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita, aka Mr Miyagi, certainly shouldn't come as a surprise.

- BRANDON YU

And yet, among the modern crop of revamped movie franchises, it is, in fact, a somewhat bizarre outlier.

In many ways, the original film should by all means have become a fond and nostalgic relic of the 1980s, a sleeper hit that almost wholly symbolises the retrospective cheesiness we project onto that decade. Instead, its remarkably simple story, of a master fighter teaching a kid how to defeat bullies, has retained tremendous staying power, spawning, across decades, several sequels and reboots, a Netflix spinoff show and now a revamp merging its past iterations.

As if fully aware of the humble and ultimately thin material for another franchise restart, Legends tries to make practically three movies in one, tossing all of its legacies into a blender that's powered more by Macchio's and Jackie Chan's names than anything else.