YMMV / The Next Karate Kid

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Monk dancing. Zen bowling. Prom bungee jumping. The last half of the movie is... odd.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Gets it even worse than the third film, which at least is treated as canon by Cobra Kai. Word of God though, is that Daniel and his family do know Julie, having met her at Miyagi's funeral, and there's an off-hand line in Season 2 about Myagi-Do having had more than one student in the past, alluding to Julie.
• Fight Scene Failure:
  • Michael Ironside had to telegraph his punches by a considerable margin for the Colonel's final fight with Miyagi.
  • The gas station fight is supposed to show Miyagi using Deadly Dodging to make his opponents hit each other, except the actors barely pretend that's not what they're trying to do.
  • It's obvious that Hilary Swank couldn't actually do the stunt of jumping between the two rocks, given how the shot is carefully framed to not show where she's landing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Hilary Swank later appeared in the Netflix series Away at the exact same time that Cobra Kai made a Channel Hop there, which actually raised some fans' hopes that Julie could appear in it.
• Jerkass Woobie: Julie tends to drift in this territory. She's disrespectful to her grandmother and Miyagi, especially the latter when he does very little to warrant the treatment he receives. However, she lost her parents recently, has no friends except for an injured hawk (and, from her first day in school, a male colleague originally in the Alpha Force named Eric McGowan, who eventually becomes her boyfriend), and is constantly being harassed by an arrogant jerk who abuses his powers by punishing her. Her grandmother seems to be in denial about her mother's death, even calling her "Susan" (her mother's name) at one time.
• Narm:
  • After Louisa calls Julie "Susan" by mistake, Julie proceeds to remind her of her actual name and that her mother's name is Susan... Then adds that she and her father were both killed in a car accident and are both dead, all in a painfully forced manner for exposition. This set up is made even more ridiculous by the fact that Susan was Louisa's daughter-in-law, not her daughter, so it makes no sense for her to have a Freudian Slip and call Julie by that name as if she had had similar arguments with a teenage Susan.
  • While chasing after Julie, one of the cops... simply stops in his tracks to catch his breath as if chasing a younger girl was too much exercise for him.
  • What does Julie do when the monks proceed to ignore her for almost killing a cockroach? By presenting a mantis to one of them... And that gets her into their good graces.
• Moral Event Horizon: Dugan ordering one of his students to quite literally murder Eric is a rather bafflingly misplaced crossing. Dugan isn't a criminal or even the head of a proper dojo—he's the head of school security.
• Replacement Scrappy: Dugan and the school security are generally seen as a poor replacement for Kreese and Cobra Kai. With them not even being proper martial artists, their insistence on acting like soldiers the way Cobra Kai did comes across as silly rather than threatening, and Dugan lacks the theatricality that made Kreese so entertaining.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Beyond the obvious with Hilary Swank.
  • A very young Walton Goggins plays one of the Alphas.
• So Bad, It's Good: Although by no means a great movie, the film can be very enjoyable if viewed as more of a Self-Parody than a proper Karate Kid film, thanks to the Narmy dialogue, rampant Fight Scene Failure and Special Effects Failure, and bizarrely over-the-top scenes such as the Alpha Elite bungee jumping into prom and Mr. Miyagi taking a group of monks bowling.
• Special Effect Failure: Was it Zen that caused the monk's bowling ball to leap back out of the gutter, or was it the plainly obvious pop-out lever in the gutter that did the trick?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Louisa Pierce, Julie's grandmother. She never shows after she goes to the airport to head to California after Mr. Miyagi promises her he will help Julie get over her anger, and is only mentioned in passing in the "Karate Waltz" scene, during which he states Louisa taught him how to waltz in France.
  • Eric's short character arc of growing away from the Alpha Elite would have been more impactful if given more focus and showed on-screen.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • On paper, the premise of a young girl learning karate to escape her male abusers was pretty good. However, this plot is unceremoniously dropped about halfway through the movie as the Alpha Elite go through so much Villain Decay as to no longer be any kind of threat to Julie. The final fight isn't even about Julie defending herself, it's about defending her boyfriend.
  • How Julie's relationship with her grandmother would improve after Mr. Miyagi had gotten her out of her sorrow.
  • Both Louisa and Julie grieving after the deaths of Susan and her husband.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: If nothing else, Hilary Swank's performance was considered by many to be the film's sole saving grace, and the then-unknown actress would see her Hollywood profile grow considerably as a result.
• Values Dissonance: Some of what went on in The '90s wouldn't hold sway today. Examples include:
  • Julie sneering at Mr. Miyagi that he can't even speak English right, which while mean at the time comes off today as horribly racist.
  • The police immediately arresting Julie after she's just escaped from the Alpha Elite goon squad while they're allowed to go free. Sure, she broke into the school, but today a young teenage girl telling about how she'd been chased by five teenage boys much larger and more intimidating than she who were going to do God-knows-what when they caught up to her would at least warrant the boys being hauled down to the station as well.

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