Pat Morita

(On TV, November 2019) It’s possible that one of the greatest skills a filmmaker can have is to recognize when they’re about to tell a useless story … and then not doing it. I have a feeling that The Karate Kid Part III would have been greeted better had it been the second instalment of the series, taking care of tying up loose ends from the first film rather than heading over to Okinawa right away. But that’s not what happened, and so this third instalment feels like going over already-explored territory as our protagonist once again faces the first film’s antagonist. It’s a return to home, but it’s also smaller, less meaningful and far less memorable than the second film. The dramatic subplots are intensely predictable, and the conclusion is never in doubt. Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita are still good as the lead pair, but the film around them has nowhere to go and seems as stunted as its featured bonsai trees. (Quite a bit of the weirdness around the film—the impossible timeline, the farming-out of the revenge plot to someone else—can be explained by lucrative intent and production constraints, but that’s not an excuse.) There’s not a whole lot more to say about The Karate Kid Part III because it’s such a slight film. In retrospect, they should have stopped after the second one.