KARATE KID COLLECTION, THE (FILM COLLECTIONS) - DVD review

Sony has just released a "Karate Kid Collection" that features a video upgrade on all four films and some special features, including a commentary for the first one.

The Karate Kid
Though it focused on high school students and contained enough teen angst to fill a gymnasium, "The Karate Kid" was a knock-down hit with adults as well as its younger target audience. No doubt that's because its director, John G. Avildsen, also directed the first Stallone rags-to-riches, zero-to-hero boxing film, and this one plays like "Rocky" for kids.

Asian-American actor Pat Morita earned an Oscar nomination for his role as Mr. Miyagi, the mild-mannered mentor who takes a young New Jersey transplant under his wing at the California apartment complex where he works as a handyman.

Morita was first turned down for the part because the filmmakers didn't want to cast a comedian in the role. Now, of course, Morita-as-Miyagi is famous for some memorable scenes and lines, such as the one where he's trying to catch a fly in mid-air with chopsticks and his young protégé does it on the first try. "You beginner luck," the old man scoffs. The surrogate father-son and master-pupil relationship between Mr. Miyagi and young Daniel LaRusso is as much a focus as the boy's developing crush on rich-girl Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue, who took time out from her studies at Harvard to make the film). But of course the plot thread that captures the attention of all those testosterone-saturated kids on the cusp is the bullying Daniel endures at the hands of a group of boys who learn a negative style of karate from the Cobra Kai dojo.

Daniel, meanwhile, learns from an old man who "inherited" his karate in Okinawa. Unlike the Cobra Kai sensei, Mr. Miyagi learned karate and fishing from his father and fought only for his life, not for points. He has no belt, which, he laughs, is only good for holding up pants. And while the Cobra Kai Sensei, John Kreese (sneeringly played by Martin Kove) has a photo of himself in his Vietnam special forces uniform with gun hanging in his dojo, Miyagi's medal of honor from WWII lies secreted away in a box for his protégé to discover. The Cobra Kais are taught to strike first, fight dirty, and show no mercy, while Miyagi, whose teaching is as organic as his approach to pruning his beloved bonsai trees, instructs Daniel that he is learning karate so the he will not have to fight. Though the conflict of styles couldn't be more stereotypically good vs. evil, the inevitable showdown between Daniel and his nemesis, Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), is as satisfying as the fight between Rocky and Apollo Creed. After all, not only is he the bully from hell (he and his thug friends ride motorcycles and wear matching skeleton costumes on Halloween), but he's a pot-smoking Eddie Haskell of a rich kid who acts proper in front of the country club set and punks it up at school. As the abusive ex-boyfriend of the girl Daniel likes, he's begging to be taken down a few pegs. There's plenty of action and a wonderful weave of plot-threads in the first film, which makes it an 8/10.

The Karate Kid II
If the sequel had played instead of the first film, it might have gotten a better reception. But it repeats so many of the same devices and structures that it suffers by comparison. Even the tradition of an annoying title sequence continues (in the first, it was the compressed-but-still-long drive that Daniel and his mom made from New Jersey to California; in the second, as if it were a TV two-parter, we have to watch scenes from the first film all over again). Still, it's entertaining enough.

The action picks up immediately after the tournament that ended the first film. This time Mr. Miyagi gets a note from an old flame telling him his father is dying, and he returns to Okinawa, accompanied by his young protégé. The relationship between Miyagi and Daniel continues to develop, with Daniel eventually helping his teacher cope with the loss of a father, as he had to do. But the bullies are overly familiar this time, every sneer and smear, every push and taunt a déjà vu. They're met at the airport by a smarmy young Okinawan who takes them not to Mr. Miyagi's village, but to a warehouse owned by his old rival, Sato (Danny Kamekona). It turns out that Miyagi had asked his father to break the father-son tradition and also teach Sato karate at the same time. But the two became rivals for the same young woman, and when Miyagi left for America, leaving behind a woman who would never marry anyone else, Sato felt betrayed. So of course Okinawa's premier karate teacher is now out to beat Miyagi in a life-or-death grudge match, while his annoying nephew and his "gang" (yes, the nephew is the star pupil who, like Johnny, teaches other karate students and always has the do-badders with him) keep pushing until Daniel also has to spring into action. The nephew, Chozen, is sneeringly (what else?) played by Yuji Okumoto ("Pearl Harbor").

Daniel finds a new love to replace the one who dumped him (apparently Shue had no interest in the sequel), and it adds the same soft balance to an otherwise hard story as the first film. Tamlyn Tomita is perfectly engaging as Kumiko, and so, for that matter, is Nobu McCarthy as Yukie, the woman who came between best friends. Morita and Macchio turn in decent performances again, as do the women. The change of scenery is wonderful, the sideplots full of depth, and the script relatively strong. But the villains are so familiar that they seem like carbon copies of the first batch, transplanted across the Pacific. That, other structural similarities, and a tension that just isn't as sustained as the first make this one a 6/10, or, for fans, a 7/10.

The Karate Kid Part III
Adding "part" to this threequel didn't help one bit. More than the first films, this one will appeal only to kids and members of the Ralph Macchio Fan Club. Maybe not even them, because Ralph-as-Daniel even goes against beloved old Mr. Miyagi this time. But everything else is by the book. Kumiko didn't return to America with Daniel, preferring to follow her dream and dance for a Tokyo company, while Mr. Miyagi finally establishes his retirement-dream bonsai shop. But there's no retiring for Daniel, who is pressured into a match between a top student at the old Cobra Kai dojo that went bankrupt but, under the watchful evil eye of the former bad-ass owner's bad-ass army buddy, is going for a revival. Thomas Ian Griffith plays Terry Silver, who threatens and backs Daniel into a corner so he'll fight the Cobra Kai's top student, Mike (Sean Kanan). More sneers, more evil, more predictable than ever before. Doesn't it ever occur to anyone to call a cop? The love interest this time around is provided by Robyn Livelly, who plays the owner of a pottery shop across the street from Mr. Miyagi's. A 3/10 is all this one merits. Even fans will have to admit that it's getting old.

The Next Karate Kid
This one is destined for the film-clip games, and that's about it. "What was Academy Award-winner Hilary Swank's first starring film?" Swank, who won an Oscar for her role as a girl determined to pass for a boy in "Boys Don't Cry" (1999), is pretty Tomboyish in "The Next Karate Kid." Playing opposite Pat Morita as an orphan with a chip on her shoulder the size of a board, Swank is the clichéd good-at-heart delinquent who's turned around by the patient tutelage of Mr. Miyagi . . . and a road trip to a Buddhist monastery. If a wind kicked up, it would blow all of these characters right off the page. And where's the karate? A better title might have been "The Next Troubled Teen."

Director Christopher Cain and scriptwriters were so desperate to use the formula but vary it somehow that they ended up with an incomprehensible situation. At a high school where every student appears to be age 24-31, one of the teachers who leads a kind of special forces ROTC program there is the villain, and his thugs patrol the school like a vigilante police force. These neo-Nazis damage property, they torch a car, they bungee jump out of the rafters onto the school dance, and never does there seem to be an adult around. Except for their evil Colonel-Teacher (Michael Ironside), who orders a car destroyed and says things like "finish him off." As in, murder? Not even the bully and prize student (Michael Cavalieri) who tries to blackmail Julie (Swank) for sexual favors buys into that (yep, they drifted that far from their younger, target audience).

Add to this little blend of absurdity a love interest with a former vigilante trainee (Chris Conrad, as yet another 30-year-old high school student) who works as a security guard at a railroad yard, and things begin to look as if they couldn't get any sillier. But then the monks come onstage. Zen bowling, anyone? The first two films in this series got honest laughs with some clever lines. This one has to resort to goofiness, and even that's not enough to rescue it from a tone that's as heavy as a tome. While Morita seems to be getting tired of his character's narrow range by now, Swank isn't bad . . . but her character is such a walking cliché and the script is such a turkey that all she can do is baste a bit. This one merits a 2/10.

Parents whose kids are into martial arts might be interested to know that the set is rated PG (for mild violence and some mild language). That mild language includes "hell, damn, and bastard"—no "f-words," but just about everything else, and voiced infrequently enough to where they stand out when we hear them.

Video:
"The Karate Kid" was released in 1998 on DVD in pan-and-scan with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. This collection presents all four films in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, remastered in High Definition. I don't have the 1998 version so I can't compare, but I can say that the picture is ever-so-slightly grainy but otherwise sharp and clear, with vibrant colors.

Audio:
The first DVD release of "Karate Kid" featured English, Spanish, and French soundtracks. Sony dropped the Spanish soundtrack, presumably to make room for the sharper visual transfer and an expanded range of subtitles. The sound on this set is English and French Dolby 2.0 Surround, with subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Thai. There isn't a lot in the way of separation, but the sound is free of crackles and hiss and other defects noticeable to my ear.

Extras:
This is a three-disc set, with the first disc containing the first 126-minute film and the bulk of the extras. The plum is a full-length commentary with director Avildsen, writer Robert Kamen, and actors Morita and Macchio. There are also short features on "The Way of the Karate Kid," "Beyond the Form," "East Meets West: A Composer's Notebook," and "Life of Bonsai." The second disc features the second 113-minute film, a very brief feature on "The Sequel," and an interactive DVD-ROM game that (big surprise) isn't Mac-friendly. The third disc features the third 112-minute film on one side, and the final 104-minute film on the flipside (though they got the labeling switched).

The commentary is surprisingly among the most rollicking I've ever heard. I mean, this wasn't a comedy, was it? And yet Kamen and Avildsen carry on like Click & Clack, the Tappet Brothers of "Car Talk" radio fame, laughing and overlapping with dialogue throughout most of the film. Their exuberance never sags for a minute, and Macchio joins right in. The older Morita tries, but he gets lost in the shuffle of wise-guy voices and comedic one-upmanship. And there's some pretty funny stuff here. Kamen at one point razzes Avildsen about a line he insisted be inserted into the script. "The 'G' (in Avildsen's name) stands for 'obdurate.' You forced me to fit it in." Laughter. When Daniel goes to Ali's house and meets her parents, Kamen quips, "John's homage to his protestant past. The two stiffest people either side of the Mississippi."

Macchio, seeing himself ride a bicycle in traffic, says, "John so much wanted me to ride the bike with no hands, but I said I'd do the crane kick, but that's it." More laughter. Or when Daniel locks eyes with Ali for the very first time, one of them jokes, "Ralph, I know what you've got on your mind. Orthodontia!" Laughter. And then as the scene continues and the young couple continues to look longingly at each other, one of them says, "What do they have on their minds?" Laughter, as the cameras cut to wieners roasting in an open fire. "Ralph wants hazard pay," the other laughs. And so it goes, a free-for-all throughout the commentary that's quite fun to listen to. There are also some lighthearted informational moments, as when they laugh at a t-shirt that a boy wears at the apartment complex ("Makin' Bacon") and remark how that was unscripted. The bit-part actor just showed up wearing it. "You can't do that anymore," one of them says.

The features are play-it-straight by comparison, and the surprise here is that the musical one with composer Bill Conti and the bonsai short featuring bonsai master Ben Oki are really enjoyable and informative. Conti explains about the three types of music (dramatic underscoring, source music, and production music) a composer has to blend into a film soundtrack, and does a pretty good job of illustrating. Oki tells how "bon-sai" ("pot-tree") came to Japan, like karate, from China, and shows 400-year-old California junipers he's trained to grow miniaturized in shallow pots. But the English subtitle option is a bit of an insult, since he's as clear-speaking as Morita's character. "The Sequel" is about like the original featurettes, interesting for their behind-the-scenes footage (even home movies of the director's), but compared to the commentary they're pretty standard. Morita, who gets drowned out on the commentary, shines in the extras, and shares how the "Miyagi voice, Miyagi spirit, Miyagi presence" just came to him when he auditioned for the part. The three tease Morita on the commentary for being the only one to participate in a fourth Karate Kid.

Bottom Line:
The first film in the series is the one worth seeing, while the second one is watchable and the other two highly forgettable. But there are enough extras and the price isn't bad, so fans might want to upgrade. Like "Hoosiers," "Rocky," "Rudy," and "Seabiscuit," the first "Karate Kid" holds a special place in the triumphant, feel-good sports wing of the Hollywood film industry. It still has plenty of appeal for viewers ages 8 to 80, and if you get this package you can just consider the other films a bonus. My final score is based on the extras, the widescreen presentation, and the two films that are worth seeing. As for the others . . . um, what others?