The Karate Kid (PG) *** (From Bournemouth Echo)

The Karate Kid (PG) ***

11:30am Friday 30th July 2010 in

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IN 1984 the late Pat Morita taught Ralph Macchio karate using the art of bonsai and vehicle polish after the little Italian got his bum kicked by older kids riding motorcycles. His mum had moved to a new area and, respecting a solid Hollywood coda, he was minus a father figure.

Morita’s Mr Miyagi took Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso under his wing and got him to paint his house, wax his car and undertake all manner of tasks befitting a servant, all the while teaching him enough martial arts to wipe the floor with the Cobra Kai meanies who bent his bicycle and beat his pretty face.

This reboot gives us Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith, who cuts a doe-eyed little urchin trailing after his mum when she, rather improbably, gets transferred from Detroit to China for her vehicle-related job, the finer details of which we are not privy to.

That’s China, mind.

“Bad news Miss, we’re going to make you redundant unless you and your 12-year-old son move to an overcrowded communist country, because the United States has no more jobs for you anywhere.”

Well, what parent could do more...

And, true to form, poor little Dre Parker has no daddy – he’s dead, and the finer details of this are hidden from us also.

So the pair touch down in Beijing and are squashed into an apartment, whereupon Dre makes friends with a Western kid in the same building, plays basketball badly, is pelted by table tennis balls and then gets an absolute kicking from the nasty little Chinese bullies after he strikes up a conversation with a pretty local girl.

Quite an eventful first day, and not the keep-your-head-down technique adopted by most new kids who move to new areas, let alone foreign countries.

As in our previous incarnation, the apartment handyman turns out to be adept at martial arts: kung fu this time, which rather makes a mockery of the film’s title, but this is China after all.

He is Mr Han, played by the legendary Jackie Chan, and after intervening in a Dre vs Chinese bullies mêlée, is forced to train our weedy punchbag for a tournament in which the bullies and their kung fu group are entered.

The Karate Kid has all the hallmarks of a remake disaster and, yep, there’s a lot of silly stuff here. Out pops the Forbidden City, and guess which major Chinese landmark is wheeled out for Dre to throw his kung fu shapes on.

But there’s enough of the good stuff here to satisfy the target audience, with some solid, if easy, laughs to be had, such as Dre being forced by his mum to practise his Chinese on an Oriental-looking plane passenger.

“Dude, I’m from Detroit,” the passenger responds to Dre’s lengthy, stilted efforts.

“Oh,” Dre replies, “s’up.”

It’s not clever, but it plays well enough to young minds, and Mr Han’s fly-catching homage to the original is predictable but still an amusing wheeze.

Young Smith is a decent lead and Chan does enough in the sensei role, but Taraji P Henson as Dre’s mum is shockingly wooden, especially considering she’s an Oscar-nominated actress.

However, quality of acting is not high on the agenda of the target audience here, and 10 to 14-year-olds will lap up this reasonable coming-of-age fare.

Showing at the Empire, Odeon and ABC, film times here