‘Karate Kid: Legends’ Review: Likable Retro Corn

Because it’s the sixth installment of a 40-year-old franchise, you might assume that “Karate Kid: Legends” is going to retrofit the formula, filtering it through the sort of technologically empowered overkill that defines most latter-day sequels. There’s one explicit way that the movie updates the series. The hero, Li Fong (Ben Wang), is a teenager who’s been training at the Beijing dojo of shifu Han (Jackie Chan), where he has mastered a kung fu move called the dragon kick, a corkscrew balletic twirl that climaxes with a foot-smash to the head of your opponent — a move captured, in all its complex gymnastic glory, through rapid-fire cutting and slo-mo. It’s the film’s one concession to the four decades of Asian action cinema that have taken place since the original “Karate Kid,” and it’s designed to give you that “This is not your father’s Ralph Macchio fairy tale!” feeling.

Li, by the end, has learned to fight in a style that merges kung fu and karate — all of which traces back to the fact that Mr. Miyagi was from Japan, and that after Noriyuki “Pat” Morita died, in 2005, the producers replaced him with Jackie Chan, who is from the Hong Kong school. The films now braid two different fighting traditions together into a mythology of “two branches, one tree.”

But enough “Karate Kid” housekeeping! The key thing to know about “Karate Kid: Legends” is that from the moment Li arrives in New York City, where his mother (Ming-Na Wen) has chosen to move them after the tragic death of Li’s kung-fu-champion brother, the film dunks us in a storyline so simple, so unironic, so cheesy-sincere, so analog that you may feel it transporting you right back to the “innocence” of the ’80s. And that’s the best thing about “Karate Kid: Legends.” It’s a movie that’s unapologetically basic and wholesome and, at 94 minutes, refreshingly stripped down. In its formulaic way, it works as an antidote to the…