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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Karate Kid: Legends (Dominic Lewis)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... to marvel at how far this franchise's music has fallen or
if you seek an excellent survey of the various sounds that Dominic Lewis
can make from his mouth.
Avoid it... if you cherish the heritage of this franchise's music, all the soul and tradition of the Bill Conti scores finally vanquished from this highly processed hip hop mess.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Karate Kid: Legends: (Dominic Lewis) Combining
characters from both iterations of the Karate Kid franchise,
2025's Karate Kid: Legends expresses a familiar story of a young
man learning the arts of fighting and self-defense to protect his honor
and loved ones. It marks the first collaboration of franchise stalwart
Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan on screen, adapting elements of the
long-running "Cobra Kai" television series along the way. A Chinese boy
with aspirations to avenge his brother's death and earn the heart of a
love interest in New York learns both Japanese karate and Chinese kung
fu techniques from the two masters while fending off threatening
assholes, culminating in the obligatory, official match in which the boy
defeats the prodigy of the evil ringleader on the other side. The
storyline is surely recycled, but the tone of the film is distinctly
modernized for the new setting. Gone are much of the Japanese traditions
that originally defined the concept, and in their place is an even
bigger set of ass-kicking American mores that has to attach a solid pair
of testicles to everything. The soundtracks in the franchise have
increasingly promoted this change from the respectful days of Bill Conti
for the original series of films, "Cobra Kai" carefully translating that
Conti foundation for more modern audiences. The duo of Leo Birenberg and
Zach Robinson did not return from that series to write the music for
Karate Kid: Legends, a missed opportunity for their contributions
to evolve and shine. Instead, the assignment went to rising composer
Dominic Lewis, who had excelled in transitioning into the action realm
in prior years with creative approaches to many of his assignments. His
strategy with Karate Kid: Legends was clearly aimed at resetting
the musical tone of the whole franchise, nodding to Conti's original
themes and occasionally tossing in instrumental references as necessary
but largely ignoring the personality inherent in those scores and taking
the modernized "Cobra Kai" sound to even more extreme levels. Ready the
earplugs.
In Lewis' take on the concept, the Japanese element is almost completely gone, and the Chinese influence is barely discernable. The descending, vaguely Asian lines are sickly electronic in "5 Boroughs" and unconvincing elsewhere. Instead, Karate Kid: Legends is a bizarre blend of hip hop irreverence, post-modern action, and incongruent moments of shallow drama. It's a score of all production style and no substance, with no truly grounded sense of character or heart. Going the disco rap route isn't completely disqualifying by itself, but the way Lewis renders it makes it sound like a collection of cheap-sounding processing gimmicks. It's not unusual for synthetic manipulation of music to exist in movies striving for edgier attitudes, but that mode doesn't fit here and wasn't executed well anyway. Lewis also provides his own vocals all over the work, from accents within the score to outright hip hop songs, all of which obnoxious in this context. Songs like "Tick Tick," "Please," and "Push Down" do little to advance the score or the concept and are awful on their own. His vocalizations are sometimes so heinous that they become funny. A few of them could be mistaken for a person conducting vocal exercises or, as in "The Arena," engaging in vigorous throat-clearing during allergy season. Some of his smoother renditions, as in "Down and Out," are more palatable but too short. When the vocal passages aren't present, you receive alternating cues of light drama for the new set of themes, pointless ambient muck ("Connor" and "Bo"), or wretched action manipulation ("Dragon Kick" and "The Arena," the latter so bad that it's amusing). The sounds Lewis chooses to infuse into this keyboarded and rock band ensemble, which dominate the orchestral presence at nearly every turn, are often laugh-inducing. The idiotic siren noises in "Fight Night" are perfect for invading aliens. We've heard the banging of garbage cans in "Too Many Cooks" before, and it doesn't ever get any better. The belching sounds and other vocals in the middle of "Old Dogs, New Kicks" are hilarious. In the end, it's the excessive post-production of all these noises that absolutely ruins this score, representing the worst of conceptions about what edgy music is supposed to sound like. While developing his own new themes for Karate Kid: Legends, Lewis doesn't completely cast aside the Conti identities from the original series of films, but his execution of them is really poor. The Conti material doesn't factor much until late in the score; small pieces are littered throughout, but the inflection of the original versions is gone. Lewis teases the legacy in "Two Branches, One Tree" briefly before launching into the score's new main theme, and this music struggles to emerge from the terrible tones of "Dragon Kick." Conti's teaching motif and Daniel's theme blend with the new main theme in "Daniel-San," one of the nicest and most sincere moments in the score, but it sounds so out of place that it seems forced. These themes vaguely inform "Training Montage" in extremely post-modern methods. Lewis provides shadows from the teaching motif in "The Final, Part 1" and "The Final, Part 2," with Daniel's theme exploding at the end of the latter cue for a moment of victory that seems to suggest that the idea has passed on to another generation. Daniel's theme is then transformed into a short rock ballad in "Touch the Stars" for Lewis' own vocals, and it had informed the periphery of the song "Push Down" as well. While the rendition in "Touch the Stars" is easily palatable, it leaves you with a sense of unease at what this franchise has become. The overall presence of Conti's themes plays like a token element of mandatory inclusion rather than loving adaptation to the themes' naturally evolved states. Lewis also reinvents the wheel more than necessary in the concept, providing a new love theme for Li and Mia in this story whereas one of the prior Conti identities would have nicely sufficed. This idea constitutes the song "The Best of Me" but had debuted with completely anonymous, watery dabbling until it consolidating late in "Li and Mia." This theme is deconstructed early in the bizarre "Alone," delicately explored in "Lanterns" (which sounds like a contributing writer may have infused a little more life into this one moment), and climbs out of the main theme late in "Training Montage" with extremely distorted keyboarding. The love theme then offers some pleasant but still highly processed ambience in "Fetterman Gardens" and goes nowhere impactful in the remainder of the work. Lewis' main theme for Karate Kid: Legends is fairly decent and sounds like it's adapted from figures dating back to Conti's work. It forms the basis of the highly processed, insufferable song "Timebomb" but is faithfully developed throughout the score. It's built during most of "Two Branches, One Tree," increasingly stepping away from the franchise's musical tradition as the cue progresses by embracing heavily altered coolness in the latter half of the cue and thus sounding ridiculous. This theme is lightly plucked against the tonal meandering in "Mother Knows Best," softly keyboarded in "Black Eye, Frozen Peas" before a hip moment, tries to assert itself in the distortion of "Fong Song," and is adapted out of the Li and Mia theme at the end of "Lanterns." It guides the nasty attitude of the highly synthetic and looped "Pizza Montage," where it is progressively headache-inducing in its horrific manipulation. Forced into John Powell's Bourne Identity chase mode for banging percussion in "Too Many Cooks," the idea is deconstructed in "Bedroom Blues" for a slow respite from the madness but forced into flamboyant hip hop posturing in "Training Montage" and interrupted by a momentarily decent string interlude. The theme tries but fails to exude some warmth into "Trap a Tiger" and the start of "The Final, Part 1," and while orchestral fragments try to guide the latter cue, they lose to pounding rock infusion. Finally, the theme clarifies a bit in "The Final, Part 2," but is still obscured by its own distortions. The post-processing of the music in Karate Kid: Legends is its defining characteristic, masking the thematic development that Lewis does provide. Those who still love and appreciate the Conti scores for the original films will find this modernization to be horrific. Not only is the rampant manipulation challenging to tolerate inherently as a mixing technique, but it espouses none of the personal respect pivotal in the master and student relationship in these stories, nor the tradition of karate and kung fu from which the lessons are learned. Lewis' employment of these techniques may attract some audiences, but it will sound downright stupid to others. The album presentation mixes Lewis' score and original song selections, declining the multitudes of other song placements in the film. It's an absolute mess of a soundtrack on the whole, and it has passages that are so mind-bogglingly awful that you can only laugh at their misplacement in this concept. *
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 53:49
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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