Karate Kid: Legends — All the right moves

Karate Kid: Legends (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for punishing martial arts violence, and minor profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.8.25

A pleasant degree of nostalgia glows within this sixth entry in the popular franchise, and not merely because of its two name stars.

 

Mr. Han (Jackie Chan, left) and Daniel (Ralph Macchio, right) examine the rules for the
upcoming Five Boroughs Martial Arts Tournament, while Li (Ben Wang) sizes up his
likely opponents.

Director Jonathan Entwistle adopts an old-school, family-friendly approach, and scripter Rob Lieber deftly bridges key events going back to the 1984 series debut, along with an occasional nod to the interwoven Cobra Kai TV series. At an economical 94 minutes, this coming-of-age saga tells its story without a trace of unnecessary filler.

Entwistle and Lieber set the stage with a flashback scene lifted from 1986’s Karate Kid Part II, and cleverly re-purposed to establish a long-time friendship between Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) and Mr. Miyagi (the late Pat Morita). This defines the “two branches, one tree” mantra that binds Han kung fu and Miyagi-do karate: rooted in the same style, and — despite their differences — connected and compatible.

 

Shifting to the present day, Mr. Han is introduced as the respected shifu (master) of a large kung fun school in Beijing. His students include his great-nephew, Li Fong (Ben Wang), attending against the wishes of his mother, Dr. Fong (Ming-Na Wen). She insists that he abandon martial arts and fighting, having lost her elder son, Bo (Yankei Ge), during a lethal attack by thugs led by a defeated opponent.

 

(That’s a bit of a whoosh, and no; this wasn’t covered in a film you somehow missed. It’s solely back-story here.)

 

Unable to endure remaining in China, with its tragic memories, Dr. Fong has accepted a position at a New York City hospital. Li is forced to bid farewell to Mr. Han.

 

The Big Apple is a big adjustment, but Li gamely navigates subway routes, a new school, and a lack of friends. The latter improves when he meets Mia (Sadie Stanley), who works after school at the pizza joint owned by her father, former boxer Victor Lipani (Joshua Jackson).

 

Li and Mia spark, and they’re adorable; Wang and Stanley totally sell the tentative, flirty trajectory of their growing relationship. That said, Li runs mildly afoul of the amused Victor at the outset, when he “insults” the man by requesting a stuffed crust pizza. 

 

From that moment forward, Li is forever nicknamed Stuffed Crust. 

 

The two teens strike a bargain: She’ll show him New York, while he teaches her Chinese, in order to barter better with Chinese merchants.

Somewhere in Queens: Family strife writ noisily

Somewhere in Queens (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Parents sometimes lose their way, when it comes to an honest assessment of what’s best for their children.

 

As oft has been said, The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

Leo and Angela (Ray Romano and Laurie Metcalf) are astonished — shocked, even — to
discover that their painfully shy son has a girlfriend: a detail that he has failed to
share with them.

There’s a tendency, at first blush, to assume that Ray Romano’s new film — which he directed, co-wrote (with Mark Stegemann) and stars in — occupies the territory he mined so well during the decade-long run of television’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Comparisons are easy, given that the focus here also is on messy, complicated family dynamics.

But while there’s plenty to chuckle at, this film’s overall atmosphere is more subtly tense, some of the relationships genuinely toxic. 

 

Leo and Angela Russo (Romano and Laurie Metcalf) enjoy a simple but mostly happy life in an Italian-American enclave of boisterous family and neighborhood friends. Sunday dinners are a raucous ritual — laden with profanity-laced shouting and frequent breaking of balls — that includes matriarch Rose Marie (Karen Lynn Gorney); Leo’s father, Dominic, aka “Pops” (Tony Lo Bianco); Leo’s younger brother Frank (Sebastian Maniscalco) and his two adult sons, Luigi and Marco (Franco Maicas and Adam Kaplan); their younger sister Rosa (Deirdre Friel); Leo and Angela’s son, nicknamed “Sticks” (Jacob Ward); and Uncle Pete (Jon Manfrellotti).

 

Occasional larger-scale events — weddings, christenings and so forth — are even noisier affairs that take place amid the cheesy atmosphere of the laughably named Versailles Palace, where scores of families mingle, drink and dance to the enthusiastic chatter and platters spun by DJ Joey Bones (Erik Griffin, a total hoot).

 

Leo’s working life, however, is somewhat fraught. Although amiably content to be part of the family construction business alongside Pops and Frank, this involves tolerating an endless stream of emotional abuse from both. Frank has long been the “chosen one” in Pops’ eyes, and — as such — misses no opportunity to belittle his older brother; worse yet, Frank has raised his two sons to echo such sentiments whenever possible. 

 

Maicas and Kaplan play them as obnoxious, under-educated thugs who probably grew up pulling the wings off flies.

 

Leo goes along to get along; he has long shrugged this off, in great part because he lives for Sticks’ weekly high school basketball games. Although emotionally withdrawn and painfully shy, the young man truly comes alive on a basketball court, where he has blossomed into a star athlete. Indeed, the first act features a superbly choreographed and edited — and tremendously exciting — season-ending match against the area’s top-seeded school.

 

The Sleepover: Far from a snooze

The Sleepover (2020) • View trailer 

Three stars. Rated TV-PG, for fantasy peril

By Derrick Bang

This is a silly little film.

 

It’s also reasonably well plotted, crisply paced, family-friendly and — given the proper frame of mind — a lot of fun. Director Trish Sie and scripter Sarah Rothschild toss a quartet of energetic children into a “suspense lite” scenario; while the results certainly won’t set the cinema world on fire, there’s no denying the entertainment value. (You'll find it via Netflix.)

 

Having successfully captured an intruder, our young heroes — from left, Mim (Cree
Cicchino, Lewis (Lucas Jaye), Kevin (Maxwell Simkins) and Clancy (Sadie Stanley) —
are about to learn that he's a WITSEC handler ... in other words, a good guy.

It’s also refreshing, given the genre, that a) these kids are not insufferable brats whose sole purpose is to make all adults look stupid; and b) the story does not succumb to the needless destruction of personal and public property.

 

But yes: We do get a car chase.

 

Adolescent Kevin Finch (Maxwell Simkins) is introduced while fabricating a whopper during a classroom presentation designed to share each student’s family life: an apparently frequent tendency toward wild exaggeration that fails to amuse his teacher. 15-year-old sister Clancy (Sadie Stanley) has a crush on senior Travis (Matthew Grimaldi); she’s also an accomplished cello player, but too shy to perform in public.

 

To Clancy’s greater mortification, parents Margot (Malin Åkerman) and Ron (Ken Marino) refuse to give her a phone, leaving her the only kid in the entire school without one (she insists).

 

To add insult to injury, Clancy’s savvy, über-cool best friend Mim (Cree Cicchino) always is glued to her phone.

 

Clancy further believes that her parents are hopelessly square. Dad, an accomplished pastry chef, forever embarrasses her by (among other things) “working out” — in public — with tiny finger-grippers. Ron actually fits that characterization: Marino, well remembered as smarmy Vinnie Van Lowe on TV’s Veronica Mars, plays the guy as a good-natured doofus.

 

Margot, though, has a bit of an edge; we catch a glimpse when, as school lunch monitor, she confronts a trio of disrespectful eighth-grade jerks.

 

On this otherwise average evening, Kevin is hosting best friend Lewis (Lucas Jaye) on a sleepover; Ron, determined to wean the boys from video games, insists they camp out in the back yard. This doesn’t sit well with timid Lewis, unable to enjoy kid-hood due to a helicopter mother who relentlessly broadcasts his many physical and emotional ailments and shortcomings (more perceived than real, we suspect).

 

Clancy, despite being grounded for smart-mouthing her mother, intends to sneak out with Mim, in order to attend a party at Travis’ house (while his parents are away). After all, he invited her.