The Next Karate Kid

The clearest skip in the series. Daniel is gone, the cast is entirely new, and the film pairs Miyagi with the teenage granddaughter of an old army friend in Boston, where she is living with a grandmother she does not get on with and being harassed by a school security squad run as a paramilitary club.

The parts are all recognisable and none of them fit together. There is a training sequence, a mentor, a bully with an authority figure behind him and a confrontation at the end, but the film has no tournament to build towards, so it improvises a prom. A long stretch in a Buddhist monastery exists mainly to give Miyagi somewhere to be wise in. The direction is flat and the budget is visibly smaller than the earlier films.

Hilary Swank is the only reason to watch it, and the interest is almost entirely retrospective: she was nineteen, this was her first leading role, and she won two Academy Awards within the following decade. The performance is good and the film around it gives her very little.

Pat Morita is reliable as ever and plainly in a lesser picture. Nothing in Cobra Kai or Legends requires it, and the series stopped here for sixteen years. Watch it only for completeness.