Delayed Reaction: The Karate Kid

What I Guessed It Was About: A Jersey kid named Daniel wants to be awesome at karate. He can't get in the good dojo in town, so he finds Mr. Miyagi, who teaches him using car washing and catching flies with chopsticks. In the big tournament, he gets injured going into the last round and uses an illegal move to win it all.*
*Yeah, you basically have to live in a cave to not know what this movie is about.

How I Came Into It: I've seen The Next Karate Kid which combines two of the things I dislike the most: exhausted franchises and Hilary Swank. As a result, I haven't been in a hurry to see the original. A friend of mine recently rediscovered the movie and spoke well enough about it that it jumped in my queue (It helps that he also had the Blu-ray of it for me to borrow). This is such a widely known movie movie that I knew what it was about going in. This viewing was all for seeing if the execution matched the ubiquity.

Why I Saw It: This is much better than it needed to be and held up better than I expected. I doubt this was the first movie to use some of more tired beats in the story and it's certainly not the last to do so. It didn't matter though. Daniel is a relatable protagonist. Miyagi manages to play into a lot of Asian stereotypes without it looking embarrassing in hindsight, which is pretty miraculous. Even the young Elisabeth Shue got to shine a little. She wasn't convinced to like Daniel by him winning. She just liked him and knew that Johnny was a complete jerk. Even though I knew every beat of the last five minutes of the movie, I was still into the whole thing. That's a magic trick that the best sports movies pull off (It's certainly why I love Warrior so much).

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I wish I could've discovered this movie by accident. This would've benefited a lot from that. It still holds up, but it would've been great to wonder if this was going to end like Rocky 1 or Rocky 2. Hell, it could've been Rocky V, complete with a street brawl at the end. That would've been interesting. While we're tackling wish fulfillment, I'd've liked to scrub the Hilary Swank reboot attempt from my memory too.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend