Film reviews: Falling Into Place | Karate Kid: Legends
Skye-set drama Falling Into Place suffers from some less-than-convincing dialogue, but it’s better when director and star Aylin Tezel lets her images tell the story, writes Alistair Harkness
Falling Into Place (15) ★★☆☆☆
Karate Kid: Legends (12A) ★★★☆☆
Set in Skye and London, romantic drama Falling Into Place attempts to grapple with the complexities of modern love but too often sabotages itself with the cringier tropes of the genre as its protagonists’ instant attraction gives way to the realities of their baggage-filled lives.
That’s too bad because the idea itself is solid enough. Kicking proceedings off on Skye, the film’s German writer/director/star Aylin Tezel makes the most of the dramatic landscapes and crepuscular light to form a bewitching backdrop for her character, German set-designer Kira, to strike up a swooning, flirty relationship with returning local Ian (Chris Fulton) as she attempts to get over a bad break-up back home in London. Ian responds to her self-deprecating rawness with the sort of glib bravado that’s attractive in the moment, but in the cold light of day masks an emotional detachment regarding his own family that he’s not yet ready to deal with.
This puts a dampener on proceedings almost immediately when Kira becomes unwittingly entangled in a family emergency following a magical night with Ian spent walking and talking and making out. Resolving to go their separate ways without exchanging numbers, they proceed to spend their time separately back in London ruminating on the fantasy of what might have been, all the while reckoning with the ongoing catastrophes of their respective personal and professional lives.
Though striving for the kind of emotional resonance seen in films like the Before… trilogy and Past Lives — movies freighted with the bittersweet ripple effects of fast-forged connections — Falling into Place is, unfortunately, a little more tonally inconsistent, its melodramatic moments sometimes clashing awkwardly with scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in the sort of of trad rom-com that can better handle characters making emotional spectacles of themselves without necessarily coming off as unhinged.
As a writer/director Tezel is better when she lets her images tell the story. When she relies on some of the less-than-convincing dialogue exchanges, or the overbearing piano score to telegraph what the characters are feeling, it all gets a little much. That said, Tezel and Fulton have their moments and a small, but powerful, supporting turn from Anna Russell-Martin as Ian’s vulnerable sister Annie gives the film some genuine gravitas late on. But as the film tries to wrap things up in a way that will justify the romantic promise of the title, it over-eggs things with a needlessly drawn-out conclusion when a more ambiguous ending would have served it better.
Like the Karate Kid spin-off TV show Cobra Kai, Karate Kid: Legends is an economical slice of fan service that’s more pleasurable than the sixth instalment of a largely patchy 40-year-old franchise has any right to be. Uniting original Karate Kid star Ralph Macchio with martial arts legend Jackie Chan, who took on the Mr Miyagi-adjacent mentor role of Mr Han in the otherwise dismal 2010 remake starring Jaden Smith (mercifully absent), the film mostly revolves around appealing newcomer Ben Wang, cast here as Li Fong, a transplant from Beijing newly arrived in New York with his doctor mother.
Back in China, Li was training with Mr Han, his uncle, who turns out to have had a longstanding friendship with the late Mr Miyagi. Following a family tragedy involving kung fu, however, Li has promised his mother (Ming-Na Wen) no more fighting — a promise he struggles to keep as he arrives in New York and promptly falls for Mia (Sadie Stanley), a sparky girl from his new class who works in the neighbourhood pizzeria and whose ex happens to be the insanely jealous local karate champion (he’s played by Aramis Knight).
Nimbly directed by Jonathan Entwhistle, the film remixes the boy-meets-girl, boy-meets-mentor, mentor-trains-boy-to-fight-girl’s-ex formula by having Li improbably but entertainingly take on the mentor role himself when Mia’s ex-boxer dad (a very fun Joshua Jackson) decides to get back in the ring in a doomed attempt to clear the debt on his pizza joint — a debt held by a loan shark who also, yep, runs the aggression-promoting dojo where Mia’s ex-boyfriend is in training for the upcoming citywide karate competition.
It’s all joyfully preposterous, more so when Chan’s Mr Han arrives out of the blue and encourages Li to enter said competition to help Mia’s family out of their precarious financial position. Realising his kung fu training isn’t going to cut it in a karate competition, Mr Han promptly flies to California to persuade Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso to come back to New York to teach Li “Miyagi karate”.
Surprisingly, the film makes only a token effort here to weave together the two branches of the franchise’s mythology (Macchio’s role is more of a glorified cameo). But in a climate of bloated legacy sequels in which even the most minor characters are given extended backstories, there’s something to be said for a breezy 90-minute summer movie that just wants to deliver the hits.
Falling into Place is in cinemas from 6 June; Karate Kid: Legends is in cinemas now.
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