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Rating: "When you walk on the road, if you walk on the right, it's fine. If you walk on the left, it's fine. If you walk in the middle, sooner or later you get squashed like a bunch of grapes.
So, karate is the same thing.
If you learn karate, it's fine. If you don't learn karate, it's fine. If you learn karate 'hopefully...', they'll squash you like grapes"
"The Karate Kid"
Directed by John G. Avildsen - 1984
Plot
Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is Italian, poor, fatherless, with a nagging mother and a horrible hairstyle.
If he were missing a random limb, he would have been Lars Von Trier's fetish actor.
He's just arrived in California from New Jersey, but he's already tanned worse than David Hasselhoff after five seasons of Baywatch.
Immediately he discovers that the new house is a dump where nothing works, despite the agency lady's insistence that it had previously been rented to a well-known politician for only €15 per semester. Fortunately, however, within the same shanty complex lives Mr. Miyagi (Noryuki "Pat" Morita), a Japanese handyman who must have gone mad watching Jasmine Bleeth running on the beach and who for 15 years has been trying to catch a fly with Chinese restaurant chopsticks.
But California is mostly beaches and pretty girls, and so Daniel meets Ali (Elisabeth Sue), who for review purposes we will call "The Beautiful Ali," but we all know she's not all that beautiful.
After all, it's the '80s: hairstyles occupy the entire cabin of an Ape Car, clothes are loose where they should be tight and tight where they should be loose, colors seem like the clash of two Sicilian carts driven by two drunk Romanian drivers, the music is flamboyantly cheesy with a snare drum effect lasting six seconds like "TU-DU-TCHAAAA."
In short: after about 4-5 shot takes, the spark flys between young Danny and "The Beautiful Ali."
But "The Beautiful Ali" is also of interest to Johnny, a sort of super buff Draco Malfoy, rich and violent, leader of a gang of bikers obsessed with karate, as pleasant as hanging a welding clamp right there, who as soon as he sees Daniel flirting with "The Beautiful Ali" beats him up worse than a smoked cheese.
From that moment on, young Danny begins a waking nightmare. The amiable Johnny and his gang use him as a stress reliever, pounding him at every opportunity: while playing soccer, while biking home, at the hairdresser's, while sending texts to participate as a contestant on "Men & Women"...
The rest of the story you know.
We discover that Mr. Miyagi is a karate master beyond just a deep thinker (although maybe he's been too into Vangelis and Osho books), and one night he beats up Johnny and his gang.
To finally settle the issue, there's only one solution: a confrontation on neutral ground at the city's super tournament (which, incidentally, counts among past winners names like Bud Spencer, various characters from Dragon Ball Z, and my paternal grandmother).
Daniel thus begins an intensive period of training filled with gutalax pearls of Eastern popular wisdom from the bar and chores that actually hide the secrets of the sacred martial art, including painting a fence as long as the Great Wall of China and waxing Marchionni's car fleet.
Finale in pure American dream style.
"The Karate Kid" - Free Thoughts
- John G. Avildsen was also the director of the first (in the writer's opinion beautiful) "Rocky";
- Just like in Rocky, the movie's message is summarizable as: "If instead of hanging out with bad company, you dedicate your time to the elderly and listen to their wise advice, help your parents with household chores and do a lot of sports, you will have success and women";
- Also like Rocky, the redemption desire of the tomato soup (the Italian-American protagonist) proves strong enough to beat McDonald's (Apollo Creed - the very evil sensei of Kobra Kai, probably Chuck Norris's cellmate during the Cambodian war);
- Noryuki "Pat" Morita - already well known to the general public for playing the owner of the "Arnold's" fast food joint in Happy Days -, actually, never practiced martial arts. He also spoke English perfectly, without any Asian accent. For his performance in this film, he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor. More than twenty years later, anyone seeing an image of him automatically associates it with the figure of "Master Miyagi";
- Aside from the fact that Ralph Macchio is one of the most ridiculous names ever heard, as a karateka he is about as believable as Frattini as Minister for Foreign Affairs. You can say all you want about karate being mind, balance, concentration etc etc etc... but if you weigh 40 kg for 1.60 meters and the circumference of your chest is a negative number, even the janitor will fill you with whacks;
- EVERYONE, at least once in their life, tried to do the "Crane Technique," or whatever the final move was called;
- When, during the final fight, Danny is on the ground with a broken leg and Master Miyagi says "Stand up! ...stand up!", the hairs on your neck become iron wires. Now someone will come, as usual, exhibiting shamelessly the broom sticking out from their backside, saying: "Gnuu! Gnuu! What a crappy movie! That scene didn't mean anything to me!". But I know, you know, and our necks know they're lying.
"The Karate Kid" - Final Considerations
In its small way, a great movie.
Not only because it represents a piece of childhood-adolescence for more or less all of us but also for how it reinterprets the tale-parable of the "Italian Stallion" in an adolescent key, maintaining intact its spirit purity, its sincerity in intentions.
However, while "Rocky" focused entirely on its protagonist's desire for redemption, in "The Karate Kid", the narrative fulcrum shifts more towards the student-teacher relationship.
The result, even without that load of despair, that aura of "last chance of life" that made "Rocky" great, remains at times an exciting film, if not even touching in its simplicity and naiveté, for the way it delicately outlines the bond that develops between two beings, each in their own way, "strangers in a foreign land."
"The Karate Kid" - A Dedication
1) To all those who, like myself, were in elementary school in the '80s and today can count on at least 15 full viewings of the film;
2) To all those who, after watching "The Karate Kid," signed up for Judo/Karate/Tae-Kwon-Do, finding themselves running in pajamas around a tatami to get beaten by those with the yellow belt and today, at thirty, suffer from sciatica;
3) To all those who dreamed at least once of avenging the bullying suffered from fifth-graders with a flying kick in front of the whole school;
4) To all those who found themselves hoping that maybe even tidying up their room was part of a secret training;
5) To all those who thought that pruning a bonsai could be a "cool" pastime;
To each of you, who may be reading these words from behind a desk, tied up by shirt and tie, mentally sodomized by an office manager you know to be an undereducated, I say:
"Stand up! ...stand up, Daniel-san!"
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