YouTube Red recently launched its Karate Kid streaming video sequel, Cobra Kai. After five trips to the movie well with generally declining success, why revisit The Karate Kid again? We know why the money keeps flooding into these endless reboots, re-imaginings, and sequels: artistic timidity. Investors are looking for a guaranteed audience. But what’s in it for you?
To answer that, you need to know something interesting about movie scripts: they’re typically about 110 pages long. That’s not much if you consider what the standard screenplay format looks like:
Notice all the white space left for scribbling. A typical shooting script contains about as much story as, say, a fifty page novelette. It’s up to the director to turn that into something richer than an outline.
Movies don’t have a lot of space to work out their ideas, which is why mediocre films are so full of cliches, stereotypes, and lazy tropes. But even a very good movie, like Karate Kid, can fail to stand up to close scrutiny. Karate Kid provides the audience a powerfully cathartic emotional experience, but only by undermining its own premises.
In the movie, antagonist Johnny and the protagonist Danny are both young men who’ve found surrogate father figures, but with wildly different luck. Johnny’s mentor is the sociopathic Sensei Kreese, whose philosophy is “Strike first, strike hard, no mercy.” Kreese teaches his students to value themselves for the same reason he values them: winning. Danny’s mentor Mr. Miyagi teaches him to seek beauty and balance in his life, to value himself for the way he fights, not the outcome.
It’s a lovely idea, but here’s where the movie lets itself down: Mr. Miyagi’s philosophy of life doesn’t really do anything for Danny. Instead Danny resolves his problems by busting out a secret, unbeatable karate move. Your younger self, thrilling in Danny’s triumph, probably never stopped to ask why surprising an opponent with the kick to the face is any more admirable than sweeping his leg. It’s not. The famous crane kick might be a Miyagi-do technique, but it’s a Cobra Kai move.
So here’s the reason to revisit Danny LaRusso after all these years: Danny never actually learned the lessons Mr. Miyagi was trying to teach him.
The ten episode streaming format gives Cobra Kai room to explore the themes the Karate Kid films bungled. Along the way it hits the obvious comic tropes for two middle-aged men who never got over their youthful rivalry. In fact at times those comic beats are so obvious they’re a bit tedious. But I think the story is best enjoyed through this lens: Danny still has to learn the true value of Mr. Miyagi’s philosophy. He does the Miyagi-do shtick, but without Miyagi’s personal guidance Daniel has actually become the embodiment of the Cobra Kai ideal: powerful, admired, and superficially successful.
Johnny, on the other hand, has become something nobody aspires to. He’s a bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, able-ist loser, still trying, unsuccessfully, to pick up women in his broken down old 80s muscle car. But Johnny is not, like Sensei Kreese, a sociopath. He never was.
After a series of plot points too contrived to bother explaining, Johnny reopens the old Cobra Kai dojo; but it doesn’t attract the lordly golden boys of yore. Johnny’s school is a magnet for losers — the fat girl, the short kid, the deformed kid, and the smart kid. He mocks their deficiencies in a way that would be unforgivable except for one thing: Johnny sincerely wants to help them. He might be an obnoxious, alcoholic meathead, but he cares, and the kids who need that respond to it. Unfortunately, the only thing Johnny’s got to offer them is what Kreese gave him: “Strike first; strike hard; no mercy.”
When it focuses on Johnny’s interactions with his students, the series achieves some thrilling but disturbing moments. What we’re watching is young people being radicalized by exposure to a truth too uncomfortable for the adults in their lives to acknowledge: going to somebody in charge won't fix the toxic feelings other people have toward their oddities. Rather than face that truth, the well-meaning adults have trained them to dance around it with comically fluent postmodern jargon.
Johnny might be spectacularly unfit to be anyone’s spiritual mentor, but Cobra Kai suggests that he just might have a point: some people won’t leave you alone until they know you can punch back. The kids (who are great by the way) are getting useful lessons in resilience, but also lessons in cruelty and ruthlessness that haven’t served Johnny well at all.
Cobra Kai wouldn’t be a Karate Kid sequel if it didn’t have its moments of cheesy dialog, hammy acting, and outrageously improbable coincidence. But it’s helpful to think of it as a continuation of the fairy tale for the adults of the Karate Kid generation. It picks up Johnny and Danny’s story at a tricky time in life, when you've got make sense of things for yourself, without they people you looked to for guidance. Sometimes it’s because the’re gone, and sometimes it’s because you have to outgrow them.