The Karate Kid Part III

Skippable on its own merits and much harder to skip than it used to be, which is an unusual position for a film to end up in. For thirty years this was the entry nobody defended: Daniel regresses to where he was at the start of the first film, the plot requires him to behave stupidly for an hour, the tournament rules are rewritten to manufacture a finale, and Miyagi spends the film being right and being ignored.

What changed is Terry Silver. Thomas Ian Griffith plays a wealthy industrialist who takes a personal interest in destroying a teenager as a favour to a friend, and the performance in 1989 is enormous, theatrical and entirely unembarrassed. Cobra Kai brought the character back decades later and built two of its best seasons on him, which means a viewer going into the series without this film will miss where its most entertaining villain comes from and why his methods are what they are.

The film itself has not improved. The pacing is slack, Mike Barnes is a thug with no interior, and the central misunderstanding between Daniel and Miyagi is maintained by both characters declining to have one conversation. It is the weakest of the four by most measures.

The honest recommendation: skip it if you are only watching the films, and watch it if you are going on to Cobra Kai. The series treats it as canon in detail, including the bits nobody remembered.