When is the last time you forgot all about yourself and laughed your heart out, clapped in full enthusiasm for a movie?
When is the last time the victory of a protagonist made you feel like as if it is your victory?
When is the last time you are ready to overlook all the loopholes in the movie just for the appeal it makes to your heart?
This one may make you do all these...
This is a light hearted coming of age movie of a twelve year boy who struggles to cope with the change in his living environment due the change in working location of his mother.its a simple story told in a simple way without much complications of subplots.
The story revolve around dre parker played exceedingly well by jaden smith, who along with his mother moves to china from detroit due to her work commitments. there he got attracted towards a young violinist, Mei Ying, which puts him under the wrath of a kung fu prodigy named cheng. humiliated by him,dre was again shattered and pleased at the same time to know that both cheng and mei ying were on the same school as he is.
The torment for dre continues in the hands of cheng,during a particular point where the beating gets more brutal,Mr.han ,played by jackie chan comes to the rescue. then the rest of the story deals with the metamorphosis of dre in the hands of mr.han in to a kung fu expert, and how he manages to keep his head out of the harassment caused by cheng group.
Performance wise the movie is excellent, jackie chan has a scorching screen presence which was well made use of, and the surprise factoe here is actually jaden who simply excels in his role. actually i was personally surprised to see such a performance from him after annoying us in ,'the pursuit of happiness' and 'the day the earth stood still'. apart from the lead,
Taraji P.Henson , who plays sherry parker, dre's single mother and Wenwen Han, aho plays dre's crush attracts some attention.apart from them none of the cast attracts attention, that can be attributed to their limited time on screen.
Technically the movie is more than adequate for a kid movie.having said all these this is not a perfect movie.the romance between dre and mei ying was very poorly conceived.i dont know what sort of logic exists between snogging of two kids who havent even hit puberty with respect to their age!!!another ridiculous thing about the movie is its title, not even a single word of karate was used in the movie by any of the characters also given the fact that the movie is basically about kung fu, why calling it 'The karate kid', instead of 'The kung fu kid'?????
But as i mentioned above all these things can be overlooked for some hearty performances by the lead cast and for its simple and a heartfelt story.
Go for it to find out why Jackie chan is said have no substitute, and also let out the kid inside your heart.
Note:don't judge this movie by its IMDB rating,as this movie is said to be a 1984 movie of the same name. people who watched the original version naturally won't like this one,being a remake.
the movie never engages its audience and at the end of the day, falls just like an average 'above mediocre' flick.cinematography was above par in this movie and uncompromising stylish making saves the film to a certain extent but lack of taut script hurts it badly. vinay yet again comes back with a spirited performance pursuing his good work from Jayamkondan , but it takes a couple of reels for us to get used to his original voice which he rendered for the first time in movies. though Kajal Agarwal's Character was not Complete she didn't fail to impress us, the amount of hardwork she has put in to memorise her dialogues has helped her in score high in comical scenes.
Kalabavan Mani was wasted yet again with a half baked character whom we fail to understand even after the end credits!The songs are fresh and peppy , thanks to the colonial cousins(Hariharan and leslie lewis) .'Vellaikari...' , 'padhi kaadhal....' are the notable ones, but this saggy script fails to make full use of it.more over the director seems to be misguided at most times , he concentrates too much on scenes which dont deserve much attention and didn't contribute to the story at all eg:- the love encounters between kajal and vinay(they fail to impress you anyway!!!!). while he treats scenes which forms the heart of this film like the one where vinay was revealed the truth about his identity.much was expected from the director who gave us some solid and sensible entertainers liks 'vasoolraja' , 'attahasam' etc.But the only area where the director proves his mettle was the way in which he handled the character of cochin haneefa.it was one of the trademark character of saran.
