Karate Kid (1984)

Karate Kid: Directed by John G. Avildsen. With Ralph Macchio, Pat Morita, Elisabeth Shue, Martin Kove. A martial arts master agrees to teach karate to a bullied teenager.

“I being a child of the 80u0026#39;s have a soft spot for this movie. Yes it is predictable,but what makes it a great movie is the performances by the 2 main characters. Ralph Macchio is great as a teenager that is bullied at his new school. But the movie belongs to Pat Morita as Mr. Myagi. He plays an old apartment maintenance man that befriends Macchio. He becomes his karate teacher, but they develop a great friendship that makes the movie all the more enjoyable. The great thing is that the movie shows that the old man comes to need the kid as much as the kid needs him, it is a touching relationship. All the rest is standard Rocky film stuff, but what Rocky and this film have in common is that the characters are people we care for, so all the climactic scene stuff works.”