THERE ARE SO many things wrong with this movie. Ralph Macchio is still playing a high school senior even though he’s pushing thirty. Mr. Miyagi’s formerly subtle, well-placed quips of wisdom from the first film are now a relentless barrage of New Agey self-help schmaltz. Daniel’s new love interest is an Okinawan girl who takes his jokes literally, missing his already unfunny humor (but adding an unintended aura of borderline racism to the entire film!). The young villain is an inherently unthreatening individual who cackles at inopportune moments like a bipolar hyena. A former friend of Mr. Miyagi’s named Sato speaks in an unintelligent guttural fiasco that can only be described as “evil guy voice.” The best moments of the first film are overtly recycled, functioning less like fun callbacks and more like thinly disguised, sad approximations of their former selves. The plotting is generic. The music is pushed. The performances are stilted. The pacing is awful. This film is simply not good.
But there’s a moment a little more than halfway through the film that has always fascinated us. One that we have revisited often throughout the years. It takes place just after the death of Mr. Miyagi’s father. He is sitting by himself on a beach in one of the few simple, elegantly composed shots of the film. He occupies the left side of the frame. The right side is empty. As the score settles into a subtle, ambient position that suggests it will lay back over the next few minutes so as not to compete with an important moment, Daniel walks up and sits in the empty portion of the frame.
For the next few minutes, Ralph Macchio delivers a monologue about the time he lost his father. How it made him feel. His sense of regret for not telling his father more often that he loved him. But also how he believes, deep down, that his father understood how much Daniel did care for him. Even though he didn’t say it enough. And that Daniel has learned to be okay with this. The score lays back in all the right ways. The monologue is a nuanced wave of elegant restraint and raw emotion. Ralph nails it with a naturalistic display of loving support for his friend, appropriately colored by his own personal remorse. Even the wind seems to kick up at all the right moments, as if the universe is itself a collaborator in this epic cinematic moment. And as Daniel nears the end of his speech, you can’t take your eyes off of him. Until you do. Because you soon notice that Mr. Miyagi’s lips are beginning to quiver. And his eyes are welling with tears. And Daniel sees it too! And he feeds on it as he nears the climax of his story! They work together like the perfect team! The chemistry is impeccable! And the tears may not hold. But the lips outright tremble now! As Daniel finishes his story, he reaches out for his friend’s shoulder, and just at the moment…a single tear falls down the right side of Mr. Miyagi’s face. The score peaks. The wind dies down. The scene ends.
What. The. Fuck.
How did that happen? Like a golden cloak shimmering in the midst of a veritable sea of dog shit, this utterly perfect scene emerges from the cesspool that is The Karate Kid Part II. And all of our snark…all of our judgment…all of our criticisms of the movie…they are at once all thrown back in our faces. And we are forced to eat the very shit that we once threw. Because we cry with this film now. Genuinely moved by it. And shocked that a moment of such greatness can occur in a vacuum.
Mostly, though, we are humbled. And we remember that making a decent piece of art is incredibly difficult. It requires every possible skill set you can muster, and then it requires a lot of luck on top of that. So every time we hear Peter Cetera’s over-the-top theme song, we remember that The Karate Kid Part II is simply trying to be “the man who will fight for our honor.” We remember that this fight is a noble one in and of itself. So we try on a little respect. We let the snarky criticism go. And we celebrate the wonderful four minutes that this bizarre, confusing film gifted to us.