Monthly Archives: May 2025

Movie Review: Karate Kid: Legends

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An ongoing theory about why movie sequels are so similar to the original movie is that producers are afraid to try something new due to the financial risk involved, because taking a chance on a new idea might hurt the box office because fans of the original might resent a major change to an iconic story idea from fourty years ago. The plot of the new movie “Karate Kid: Legends” is almost a carbon copy of the original Karate Kid(1984), the second Karate Kid (1986), and even the third Karate Kid (1989).

A young teenage boy Li Fong, played by Ben Wang, learns Karate under the mentorship of a teacher, and runs into a horrible bully who also knows Karate. There is a love interest, Mia Lipani, played by Sadie Stanley where the young boy falls in love with the former girlfriend of the bully, creating a great conflict and later a fight and that leads to a huge Karate tournament climax. This is the exact story behind just about all of the Karate Kid movies. The only new idea in this movie is that this time around Li Fong tries to train his girlfriend’s father Victor Lipani, played by Joshua Jackson, who owes money to the mob (more bullies), and Victor enters an MMA tournament to win money to pay off his debt. This storyline dies on the vine pretty quickly and seems more like an additional idea to make the runtime of the movie longer than any other reason.

This story starts in Hong Kong with Li Fong being forced to move to America because his mother is worried about losing another son to the violence that killed her oldest son. While living in Hong Kong, his Karate trainer is Mr. Han, played by Jackie Chan. Due to the tournament that Li Fong enters to help pay off Victor’s bad debt to the mob, Mr. Han travels to New York City to help Li train. Mr. Han then visits Daniel LaRusso, played Ralph Macchio in California, to convince him to come to New York City to help with the training. All fans who see the movie trailers and posters hoping that Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio are in this film a long time will be disappointed as they mostly appear in the last 20% of the film.

Some of the training of Li Fong is very well done, along with the final fight with Connor Day, played by Aramis Knight.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of a low 57% is understandable due carbon copy storyline, with my rating a passable 70%, mostly for fans of the Karate Kid movie franchise.

Movie Review: The Last Rodeo

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The new movie “The Last Rodeo” is about bull riding in the United States. From a search on ChatGPT, about the hazards of this sport in the United States:

With injury rates of 1440 per 1000 hours, bull riding is 10 times more dangerous than American Football and 13 times more dangerous than Hockey. These injuries include Contusions, Concussions, Shoulder, and Knee with 1-3 deaths annually. Most of these injuries happen during dismounts or when riders are thrown off and subsequently trampled or gored. Considering the insane popularity of watching someone ride a bucking horse or a bull, and the injuries, it is very hard to believe that Bull Riding is a viable sport anywhere in the world.

This story is about a long-retired bull rider, Joe Wainwright, played by Neal McDonough, who almost died from a riding accident many years earlier. Joe’s grandson Cody Wainwright, played by Graham Harvey, is gravely ill with a brain tumor and he then decides to enter a bull-riding contest to win money to pay for the complex brain surgery to save his Grandson’s life.

Joe reunites with an old friend Charlie Williams, played by Mykelti Williamson, whom he had not seen since his wife died many years earlier. The friendship between these two men is one of the best parts of this movie. At first, it looked like Joe would compete in the over-50 bull riding contest, but for reasons never explained, he winds up competing in the headline bull riding contest, where the prize money is 750,000 dollars.

The other good part about this story is the relationship between Joe’s daughter, Sally Wainwright, played by Sarah Jones, which is about the anger Sarah feels towards Joe and his decision to ride again, and what she had to go through when he was almost killed the last time he rode a bull.

The outrage over medical costs in this country and insurance companies, in this story paying only 40% of the total cost of life-saving surgery for a 10-year-old boy, has been a major backstory for many movies over the years, addressing the insanity of medical costs in the United States. With the high probability that this reality will never improve due to the years and criminal abuse that has existed for decades within the medical insurance industry.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for The Last Rodeo are a low 73%, mainly because there is nothing new or original in this story, with my rating a solid 75% and a moderate recommendation, due to the acting and the importance of the medical aspect of this story.

Movie Review: Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning

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The good news is that, to ultimately save the life of Tom Cruise and any number of stuntmen who create the most dangerous movie stunts in the history of film, this eighth installment., “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning” will most likely be the very last Mission Impossible movie. The problem with insane stunts like these is that for each new film, the producers always try to top themselves, and one day, during one mundane take of an action sequence, someone is going to be killed.

This new movie now has the most dangerous stunt scenes ever filmed, including the climax with two biplanes and Tom Cruise wingwalking, and climbing around both airplanes with a high probability of instant death. Some videos about these stunts explain the years of planning and risk involved (included in this blog) as Tom Cruise has once again topped himself, but has put his life in the most extreme danger in this movie.

As far as the rest of this 2-hour and 49-minute action film, there are times when the story is rather slow with a plotline that is overly crazy and complex, about a worldwide AI virus and the series of tasks required to find the source code and then trap the virus to save the world. There are also very dangerous scenes on a submarine where Tom Cruise spends a long period underwater looking for this container that, along with another device, is needed to trap the AI virus that is putting the world on the brink of nuclear war. This part of the action is the most far-fetched, with Tom Cruise at one point without a diving suit very deep in freezing cold water, something that would definitely kill any human being.

The rest of the cast includes the two regulars in this long-running movie franchise, including Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell, with Hayley Atwell as Grace, and did not include Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust who has been Ethan Hunt’s long-term love interest and was in the last Mission Impossible movie released in 2023. This is because she was killed off in the last movie, something I did not like about the previous Mission: Impossible film. I also thought the ending of this film was too similar to the ending of Mission: Impossible Fallout, released in 2018, and the film was unnecessarily long.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews for this film are an anemic 80%, mainly due to the overly complex and convoluted plot, with my rating 100% for the incredible action scenes and a solid 85% for this movie.