![]() Hilary Swank was 20 when she made The Next Karate Kid, but thanks to some clothing decisions from the wardrobe department (dungarees, baggy T-shirts, chunky trainers) and an unfeasibly straight fringe, she just about passes for an average 90s teenager – albeit one of the sulkiest teenagers in all cinema.Ĭhris Conran, meanwhile, was about 24 when he made the film, and looks older. Subscribe Hilary Swank and various other actors pretend to be teenagers Inevitably, their youth and tight jeans are no match for Dugan’s scowling virility, and the colonel’s opponents are swiftly punched to the ground and mocked. ![]() Distinguished by their uniform of tight black shirts tucked into nipple-high jeans, the Alpha Elite are the Delta Force of hall monitors – a highly-trained group muscle-bound prefects who maintain order by glowering at the pale-faced and less socially endowed and dishing out the occasional wedgie.Ĭolonel Dugan is their despotic commander, who lines his troops up on the school playing field, screams at them each in turn, and challenges random members to bare-knuckle fist fights in the mud. We soon learn that Ironside is actually Colonel Dugan, the leader of a group called the Alpha Elite. We’ll get to exactly who Ironside plays in a moment, but for now, his expression says it all: this is man who really hates M-People. While this up-tempo 90s dance number plays in the background, Ironside skulks in a high school corridor, a vein on the right side of his head subtly pulsing. Curiously, the filmmakers introduce this talented performer not with a grand, villainous entrance (because, let’s face it, when Michael Ironside appears on a movie’s credits, you can be fairly certain he’s playing a bad guy), but with a montage cut to M-People’s Moving On Up. Yes, one of the finest character actors currently working appears in The Next Karate Kid. That’s an apt summary of the difference between Hollywood and UK movies, we feel. Where The Next Karate Kid is all about growth and enlightenment, concluding as it does with the image of the mended hawk soaring into the heavens, Kes ended with the bird dead in a dumpster and a small boy crying. In place of Ken Loach’s bleakly British social realism, however, we have dungarees, big cars, and prancing Buddhist monks. ![]() The Next Karate Kid, then, is a kind of high-kicking homage to Ken Loach’s Kes, in which a similarly lonely teenager who finds comfort in the training of a young kestrel. With few friends of the human variety, Julie finds refuge in a pet hawk called Angel, which she keeps hidden in a pigeon coop on the roof of her school – presumably, the hawk has long since eaten all the pigeons. ![]()
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