The original karate kid is officially my favorite movie, as documented here:
Jay's Karate Kid Review
Naturally, I had a lot of curiosity in the remake. The new one should have been called KUNG-FU KID, not KARATE. I guess they had to keep the name to capitalize on the predecessor.
My primary concern about The Karate Kid isn't that it's a remake of my favorite movie. No, my concern was that it's star is 10 years old. I don't care that Daniel was 17 and Drey is 10, I just care that Drey is 10. Who wants to see little kids get beat on? I really liked the movie "NEVER BACK DOWN" which was a bunch of 30 year old playing high school students, but even then, I didn't like the idea of underground fight clubs for high school kids. Grade school kids are even worse.
There are many parallels between the old and new, but its definitely not a copy.
The new movie is fun. The sites are beautiful, Drey is occasionally funny and occasionally obnoxious, and the fights are good. I don't think Jackie Chan is particularly remarkable. From an action stand point, that's ok, he's an instructor. From a relationship stand point, he didn't offer anything. Nothing that I bought, anyway.
Before comparing it to the first: The new Karate Kid is a good movie by itself, for the reasons already stated.
But, compared to the first, it's lacking. Drey and Han never develop the relationship that Daniel and My. Miyagi did. I was thinking about that exact point while watching the new movie when suddenly Drey stated "You're the best friend I ever had". And I thought "why"? They didn't seem like buddies to me, just a teacher and a student. I think it failed on that level. More time was spent establishing the pre-tween relationship with the little girl than with the Han, the character that should've been the essence of the movie.
They skipped the wax-on and wax-off routine (but did pay homage to it) in lieu of Jacket-on and Jacket-off. After a few days of doing that, all of sudden Drey was a defense expert. It was really cool to watch, but very unbelievable.
SPOILERS
There wasn't a crane kick, there was a cobra kick. The cobra kick was cool because you did't know what was coming. Han didn't teach it to him, and Han was just as surprised as everyone else when he did it. That's great stuff. Where it suffers, though, is that it was such a tremendous kick that I was left to wonder how the heck he managed to pull it off on his first try without any training. It involved some serious acrobatics. Again, unbelievable, but cool.