For the record, it was actually I who found myself in a movie theater to be filled with a certain remake instead of the certain video game adaptation I had intended to see. The discrepancy is no cause for concern for my mental health, however, and is owed entirely to the fickle tastes of my movie-going companion for the evening. I was not displease with the result, however. In fact, there was even an element of time travel involved in the picture we ended up in front of in that it stars a twelve year-old version of Will Smith. I thoroughly enjoyed the end result. In fact, I would like to talk about it as some length.
The movie is an exercise in mixing the new with the familiar. Jaden Smith’s mannerisms and general on-screen attitude hearken back to a time when men were in black and boys were bad with his perfect balance of cool and awkward moments. The movie’s structure is also very comfortable. It’s still a coming of age story with a boy moves to a new town, gets beat up for looking at the wrong girl, and learns to stand up for himself from a local hermit through a deep connection between every day tasks, a fundamental respect for others, and martial arts. All of the thematic components are intact. The title, left unmarred by subtitle, prefix, or roman numeral properly invokes the proper expectations. The the film it precedes does not disappoint.
Indeed, it excels. This new film takes that basic, relatable, story and changes all the details used to tell it. The initial move young Dre undertakes is made more dramatic and compelling by seating the whole film in mainland China, where dialogue quickly renders three out of seven characters of the title irrelevant as the martial art in focus becomes the local Kung-Fu. This also produces a sharp racial contrast between the protagonist and his opponents, which serves the strange in a strange land part of the story well. Jackie Chan succeeds Pat Morita in also every way in his role as Dre’s mentor, and pulls out some serious acting chops I haven’t really seen from him before. Even the symbol of the automobile has been emboldened and made more central to the character development.
The product of all this change and embellishment is not so much a remake of the original film, but an upgrade. The story is so much better told with the new actors and writing. It has supplanted the original in the same manner a new computer renders the previous model obselete. All the same lessons are learned with a much higher index of involvement.
So go see it. Mathematically you can’t go wrong.
Ja.