Rumor has it Tom Cruise was offered the chance to reprise his signature '80s role in two (!) Top Gun sequels, but refused because he didn't want to do the same thing over and over. He has a point: some films, like Star Wars or Indiana Jones (even Rocky or Rambo, to a reasonable extent), can and in fact deserve to have follow-ups, because the people who made them genuinely think there is more to tell about those characters (Rocky V is too much, though); others, like Top Gun or The Karate Kid, are crippled from the beginning by the fact that they are indelibly connected to the decade that spawned them, and also suffer from having fairly basic scripts and characters that wouldn't really benefit from any continuation of the story. Sadly, Ralph Macchio never realized this, and so here we are: The Karate Kid, Part III.
Whereas the first film dealt with a recycled subject (young boy gets revenge on those who humiliated him) from a new angle, Part III resurrects the revenge theme with all its clichés. The "driving force" (assuming there is one) of the screenplay (if you can call it that) is John Kreese (Martin Kove), the sadistic karate teacher whose students got their asses kicked by Daniel Larusso (Macchio). Broke and lonely, Kreese decides to ask an old army buddy, Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), to help carry out a diabolical plan that will make Daniel and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) suffer like never before. Getting them to fight back, however, will prove harder than usual, as Miyagi is more interested in opening a bonsai shop and Daniel refuses to act violently since he is - what a surprise, this - in love.
Love, vengeance, honor, blood and gratuitous butt-kicking are all thrown in the mix, though hardly any of them work to full effect. As a matter of fact, the more explicit violence suffocates the franchise's trademark comedy bits, leaving a few underwhelming Daniel/Miyagi moments with the duty of lightening the tone. Even worse, though, is the over-the-top behavior of the villains: Griffith does nothing but stare manically, shout and laugh, while Kove, who was funny in the first installment of the series, transforms Kreese into a grotesque parody of his earlier work. Only when the dead-certain final battle arrives, there is a sense of the trilogy regaining whatever it lost from Part II onwards. But the question remains: how many people will still be paying attention at that point?
