The Karate Kid Part II

Essential, and the sequel is a continuation in the literal sense: it opens in the car park outside the tournament, minutes after the first film ended, with a scene that was shot for the original and cut. Then it leaves California entirely.

The decision to make the second film about Miyagi rather than Daniel is the reason it works. He goes home to Okinawa because his father is dying, and walks back into a village he left before the war, a woman he was engaged to and never wrote to, and a man he humiliated by refusing to fight him forty years earlier. Daniel is the supporting character in his own sequel, which is the right call, and Pat Morita is given a great deal more to do.

It is also much more of an adventure film than the original, and the last twenty minutes tip into something closer to melodrama: a typhoon, a village festival, a duel in a ring of drums with an audience banging on them. The tension is more mechanical than in the first film and the villain is a straightforward one.

Worth knowing before you start Cobra Kai: Chozen is from this film, and the series brings him back and does something unexpected with him. Of the three sequels this is the one with the fewest reasons to skip it.