An average movie

After 2008, it seems that Will Smith, who was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, decided to take a step back to manage the career of his son. You wonder if Jaden Smith would be talented enough to secure such a production on his own but his father giving him some backup, there was no way the studios would refuse. Apparently, it was a smart move to go for this remake since it was quite successful at the box-office but, unfortunately for them, their following endeavor, ‘After Earth’, was a huge flop and you wonder where both their careers will go from there. Anyway, coming back to our main feature, I thought it was a fairly decent remake. Indeed, it followed the same storyline but they changed the setting, switch the karate to kung-fu, and got Jackie Chan to play the mentor which was some smart casting. Concerning Jaden Smith, you can say whatever you want, but the kid really knew how to fight and I was really surprised how brutal those fights looked like. I mean, the guy was just 12 years old but they really showed the real thing anyway! That’s probably the only really improvement on the original version, the fact that Jaden Smith really looked like a child, whereas Ralph Maccio was more a young adult. On the downside, it really took long (1 hour maybe) before they actually started the training and there were many cheesy and rather boring scenes. Still, to conclude, I thought it was not bad and I guess it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

6/10