Summary30 years after the 1984 All Valley Karate Tournament, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is running a successful car dealerships business while his old rival Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) is seeking to turn his life around by reopening the Cobra Kai dojo.
Summary30 years after the 1984 All Valley Karate Tournament, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is running a successful car dealerships business while his old rival Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) is seeking to turn his life around by reopening the Cobra Kai dojo.
Three seasons in, creators Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg preside over a scorching hot sandbox that’s as complex as it is cluttered. Characters keep emerging from the shadows, beats zig and zag at a rapid clip, and the action gets more and more ludicrous. But, clutter can be good for a series, particularly when it’s maintained, and the three showrunners happen to keep a clean dojo.
This object lesson on how to make a TV spin-off from an old movie franchise is even more fun third time round, and you don’t even need to be a Karate Kid fan to enjoy it.
If you liked the last two seasons, you’ll love the new one. Original characters from the first film appear throughout, giving the sense that the series has a much wider arc than it really does, while new characters continue to push the story forward.
Call-backs to the movie are as ample as fans would demand. At the same time, the show refuses to wallow in the past, preferring to drag it screaming into the present. Cobra Kai will continue to thrill Eighties kids. But it is no museum piece and viewers insufficiently ancient to appreciate the totemic significance of phrases such as “wax on/wax off” will still get kick from it.
The finale points toward an endgame. And that finale is wonderful, wonderful, ridiculous, and wonderful: A high energy showdown for youth in revolt, alongside a never-more-sensitive portrayal of middle-aged reminiscence. It reaffirms Cobra Kai as one of the cleverest reboots in our nostalgia-drunk era.
There are still more than a few moments of badly engineered plotting and situations that leave you dumbfounded none of these kids have called the police; but Cobra Kai isn’t trying to score points for believability. Season three pummels you with enough broad laughs and over-the-top twists to keep you coming back to its televised dojo, no matter how often it backslides into hokum.