Cobra Why?: “Karate Kid: Legends,” “Bring Her Back,” and “Mountainhead”

KARATE KID: LEGENDS

On some level, I guess I admire director Jonathan Entwistle's series extender for being the polar opposite of most summer-blockbuster sequels, which, with a hat tip to South Park, seem almost contractually required to be bigger, and definitely longer – to the point that, like the new Mission: Impossible, they can also appear uncut.

But Karate Kid: Legends, budgeted at a seasonally stingy $45 million, isn't bigger. Boasting a total run time of 94 minutes, it's certainly not longer. And forget uncut: This thing is ferociously trimmed down – so much so that a full third of the action appears to have gone missing. You'll rarely hear me complain about a film, especially an umpteenth followup in an apparently endless franchise, being too modestly scaled or too short. However, in the case of this latest installment in the KKU, I do feel obligated to ask: Really? This is it? This whole, paltry, indifferently shot thing exists simply to get Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio on-screen together – and even then only barely, and not until almost a full hour has passed?

If you were feeling generous, you could argue there is one more reason (aside from money) for Legends to exist, because after 41 years of sweet-faced kids mastering the Chinese arts of karate-do and kung fu, this series has finally given us a young protagonist who's actually Asian. He's Beijing teen Li Fong (Ben Wang), and after he has spent years training in kung fu under his great-uncle (Chan's Mr. Han, from the 2010 Karate Kid remake), Li's disapproving doctor mom (Ming-Na Wen) whisks her family of two off to New York City. She gets a hospital job while Li gets nothing but trouble. And if you're fluent in KK-ese, you know that trouble's gonna involve: a preening bully (Aramis Knight) who'll become our hero's rival; a romantic interest (Sadie Stanley's Mia) who, naturally, used to date said bully; and a cruel sensei (Tim Rozon), who in this telling – presumably as a cost-cutting and time-saving measure – is also a cruel loan shark to whom Mia's dad Victor (Joshua Jackson) owes money. Did I mention the teen karate championship whose cash prize will get Victor out of hock and save his beloved pizzeria? Did I mention that Great-Uncle Han arrives in NYC to train Li for the big fight? Did I mention that, for backup mentorship, Han crosses the continent to recruit Macchio's Daniel LaRusso, a fabled figure whom Han had never before met? Did I need to mention any of this?

There's something almost touching about Legends' corniness. Perhaps knowing that avoiding contrivance was impossible, screenwriter Rob Lieber instead leans into it full force, even when he doesn't have to. (It wasn't necessary that Li's mom be the attending physician when a badly beaten Victor is taken to the hospital … but it sure was convenient!) Yet unlike in 2010's Jaden Smith outing and the first few years of the Karate Kid offshoot Cobra Kai – an initially savvy, hilarious homage that lost me somewhere around season four – the dusty clichés here aren't played for droll self-awareness. Despite the comic snap of Chan, Jackson, and a few others, they're played for abject sincerity, and the shameless earnestness of it all, complete with no end of verbal, photographic, and film-clip callbacks to Pat Morita's Mr. Miyagi, makes the experience rather embarrassing. So much teary-eyed reflection and soul-searching! So much generational bonding! So many life lessons imparted! You can imagine youths of today watching the movie with their Gen X parents (or grandparents) and asking them, with a raised eyebrow, “You all liked this kind of thing?”

Most of us did, yeah. And maybe we'd have liked Legends, too, if it didn't seem to be in such a freaking rush. There's nothing inherently wrong with sentiment so long as it's earned, and John G. Avildsen's 1984 Karate Kid, like his 1976 Rocky, can still reduce you to a blubbery wreck due to the time you've spent with its characters and your clear understanding of what victory and loss mean for everyone. (Arguably, the 1984 finale reserves its heartiest ugly-cry for William Zabka's Johnny Lawrence grabbing the trophy from the official's hands and giving it to Daniel himself, shouting, “You're all right, LaRusso!” – even the film's teenage villain, if not its adult one, proves worthy of empathy.) Entwistle's offering, though, doesn't give us proper time to know anyone. Yes, the teens are merely facsimile sketches of previous series figures, and Chan's and Macchio's senseis are evidently so familiar by now that no energy is spent on re-introductions. But we still might've found these people involving and affecting had the paths from points A to B and beyond not been so hurried. We barely take in the beauties of Beijing before we're fast-tracked to Manhattan; Li is barely barred from martial-arts training before he's at it again; Han and Daniel are barely introduced before becoming devoted wisecracking pals.

Yet the most stunning example of this breathless-in-a-bad-way velocity came after Han and Daniel teamed up to coach Li, with the Five Boroughs Tournament on the immediate horizon. A big “5” appeared on-screen to underscore how many days of training were left, and I'll admit to being less surprised than shocked when – with no scenes separating them – the number was quickly replaced by a “4,” then a “3,” then a “2,” then a “1” … and then, astoundingly, a zero. Five whole days of potential montages and uplift unaccounted for! Mr. Miyagi would slap this movie's face!

Despite the excessive, deeply unnecessary employment of slow motion in the fight sequences, Entwistle appears so fanatically devoted to not dawdling and delivering the confrontational goods that all traces of the series' light, endearing comfort food fall by the wayside. (Who among us doesn't relish the original's “wax on/wax off” scenes?) Even when we're presented with the admittedly novel detour of Li getting Victor in shape for an amateur boxing match, this charming student-becomes-the-teacher conceit is hastily dropped, and appears included merely to give Li impetus to enter that lucrative tournament toot suite. The martial-arts choreography is fairly decent, if nowhere near as inventive as it routinely was in Cobra Kai. Yet the only solid reason for franchise fans to sit through Karate Kid: Legends requires us to make it to the pre-closing-credits kicker – which, courtesy of a cameo I spent the whole movie pining for, at last provides the humanity, flakiness, and wit we should've been getting all along. Man who score laughs with pizza box accomplish anything.

BRING HER BACK

Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian brothers and cheeky sadists whose Talk to Me made a considerable splash in the summer of 2023 (it stands as A24's highest-grossing horror flick to date), Bring Her Back is the infrequent, ultra-upsetting fright film that I actually do want to see again. That's partly because the Philippous' latest is pretty excellent, and partly because it's the rare supernatural outing that seems to legitimately hold together; I want to make sure by re-watching the explanatory sequence whose salient details, on a first viewing, I was slow to pick up on. Mostly, however, it's because Sally Hawkins gives the kind of wholly committed, thrilling genre performance that, barring occasional outliers such as Toni Collette in Hereditary, you almost never see. Depending on the scene, and occasionally within the same scene, Hawkins is monstrous, pitiful, endearing, terrifying, tragic, loathsome … and it suddenly makes perfect sense why this deservedly lauded British talent didn't return to franchise duties for January's Paddington in Peru. With this kind of acting opportunity, why spend time hobnobbing with a CGI bear? And if she did, what viewer of Bring Her Back could ever again look at Hawkins' flustered sweetheart Mary Brown in the same way?

As with Talk to Me, the Philippous' new project goes for the gut instantly by focusing its wrath on children, in this case 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his visually impaired, early-teen step-sister Piper (Sora Wong). Newly orphaned after their father suffers a fatal slip in the shower, they're a few months away from Andy assuming legal guardianship of Piper, and are consequently placed in the Australian foster-care system – specifically, into the home of Hawkins' spirited, eccentric Laura, who also hosts another foster child in the mute, buzz-cut Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). Even if you didn't know in advance that this A24 was a horror film – though the opening VHS footage of an apparent Satanic ritual leaves little doubt – Paula's lightning-fast flips from bonhomie to stifling, scary intensity would certainly clue you in. Piper, of course, can see none of this. Andy, however, sees it all, and soon begins to realize that Paula is creating a divisive wedge between him and his sister, one seemingly founded on the accidental death, some years prior, of Paula's own daughter. She's the “her” of Bring Her Back. And Paula, as Andy discovers, is willing to go to nightmarish lengths to make that imperative literally happen.

To their credit, the Philippous absolutely know how to push our buttons here: with the disquieting, comparatively minor offenses of Paula scrolling through Andy's phone and getting Piper drunk on whiskey; with major ones that include a wicked bed-wetting scheme and a late-night punch to the face; with the haunted and haunting Oliver, who keeps putting things in his mouth that, under no circumstances, should ever be consumed. But unlike in Talk to Me, which was clever and unsettling but a little soulless, the filmmaking brothers also display a nearly startling empathy. The richly layered screenplay by Danny Philippou and co-writer Bill Hinzman lends emotional depth to Andy's and Piper's torments, and it's augmented by the young actors' supremely heartfelt performances; you're not 10 minutes in before you instinctively want no harm to come to either of them. (I greatly appreciated the non-essential sequence of Piper relaxing with other visually impaired kids at a recreation center – a scene that suggested the contented life the teen could have were Laura not in the picture.) But the script's most satisfying aspect lies in how it makes Laura a lunatic whom you don't necessarily want to see vanquished until the moment you irrevocably do. And even then, you don't pray for her death so much as a hearty supply of mood stabilizers and an awfully good therapist.

Make no mistake: Laura's endgame is murderously diabolical and perverse. Yet Hawkins, as initially manically cheery as her Poppy in 2008's Mike Leigh comedy Happy-Go-Lucky, burrows so deeply into her character's sadness and desperation that, even at her worst (and she goes low), it's difficult to fully hate her. You may not comprehend how Laura can do the things she does. But you absolutely understand why, and Hawkins' performance electricity – the same sort that ignited Collette's A24 portrayal in 2018 – prevents the Philppous' new film from being any kind of endurance test. I wasn't just never-bored; I was close to enraptured by Bring Her Back, even when I was wincing so hard that I wasn't watching the film through my eyes so much as my eye slits. Days after seeing the film, I can't get more than a dozen scenes and images out of my mind. In a rarity for this theatre-of-cruelty sub-genre, I also don't necessarily want to.

MOUNTAINHEAD

For those who've spent much of the past two years missing HBO's Succession, and I'm definitely among their number, series creator Jesse Armstrong has treated us to the service's Mountainhead, his writing/directing debut that's like his Emmy-winning, pitch-black comedy if the other Roy siblings spent an entire, super-sized episode planning to kill Kendall. (Come to think of it: Why wasn't that an episode of Succession?) There are differences, of course. As a 109-minute standalone entertainment, there isn't much nuance, and the humanity that Armstrong found in the most morally compromised masters of the universe is practically nonexistent; here, even the nicest guy around is fundamentally shitty. But as profane, fast-talking, intensely obvious satires go, it's a lot of fun – though maybe more so as background noise than something to actively pay attention to. Despite grievances with the film, I enjoyed my Saturday-night viewing. I somehow enjoyed Armstrong's TV-movie a lot more when it played in my apartment, on Sunday night, while I was focused on other things.

Mountainhead, as a titular locale, is the Utah-based, tech-bro paradise that, for one weekend among many in the past, will house four of the wealthiest and, subsequently, most powerful men in America: Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), whose hyper-realistic AI programming is currently causing global catastrophe; Jeffrey Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), whose AI-detecting tool might be the antidote to deep-fakery; Randall Garrett (Steve Carell), the elder member of the self-proclaimed “Brewsters” quartet whose billions are unspecifically tied to finance; and Hugo Van Yalz (Jason Schwarzman), the developer of a relaxation app whose nickname “Souper” is a play on “soup kitchen,” as he's the only one whose riches, to his shame, haven't yet reached 1 billion. Hugo is also the owner of the mansion-like chalet Mountainhead, and it's there that these insufferably entitled d-bags gather to salve old grudges, start new ones, stare intently at their phones as the planet collapses, and, for three of them, plan the demise of a fourth whose response to a new technological “improvement” is decidedly off-brand.

Good God but political and tech-world satire must be hard to pull off these days, given that our real-world equivalents are generally so much more foolish, boorish, and terrifying than any made-up figures could ever be. It was consequently wise of Armstrong to not tie any of his Mountainhead characters, in more than the most oblique ways, to Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al; none of Armstrong's actors are trying for any kind of impersonation, and you take the Brewsters on their own pathetic, sociopathic terms. We get enough of the guys' platitudes and musings – whether all social-media content, no matter the damage done, is inherently “funny”; whether the 8 billion-plus of us outside their orbit are actually real – to instinctively despise them, and for much of Mountainhead, that comic detestation is energizing. It isn't sustained, however, and Armstrong's timely “What if?” scenario (its score by his genius Succession composer Nicholas Britell) ultimately folds under the weight of unrelenting sourness and repetition. The few insights we're given into the Brewsters' personal lives – Randall's failing health, Venis' first-time fatherhood, Jeffrey's concern that his girlfriend is gonna nail another guy on vacation – aren't remotely enough to justify almost two hours spent in their noxious company.

Jeez, though, the actors are good! Admittedly, Carell is Carell, which isn't a bad thing, but means he plays Randall as a more agitated and foul-mouthed Michael Scott – this despite an impressive opening scene in which the finance wizard is convinced his billions are enough to save him from escalating cancer. And although he's eventually quite funny, it takes a while for Schwartzman to find his footing as the sycophantic Hugo, who makes a comically horrific character switch after it's hinted that one of his indiscretions might go public. (It involves a private Brewsters activity and a Pop-Tart – I'll leave the rest to your imagination.)

But Youssef is sensationally alert, quick-witted, funny, and the closest thing we have to relatable as the billionaire – the only one still in conceivable possession of a soul – who can't stop razzing his pals, and who feels actual remorse about the social-media clips of global riots and mass executions. And as the behind-the-scenes cause of all that worldwide mayhem, Smith, so charismatic and captivating in May December and (channeling Chevy Chase) Saturday Night, is both a sensational and profoundly exciting actor here; not for an instant did I like him, yet I couldn't help but love him. Mountainhead may have left a crummy taste in my mouth, but between the actors and Armstrong's supremely quotable dialogue, it's still a nasty kick. It's tough, after all, to dislike a movie that so cannily acknowledges its title's literary reference with a comment on the architecture. “Who designed this place?” asks Jeffrey of his slippery, tastefully art-directed surroundings. “Ayn Bland?”