The Next Karate Kid

The Next Karate Kid continues the story of kesho Miyagi, the Japanese martial arts master played by Pat Morita. He takes in Julie Pierce, a seventeen-year-old girl carrying anger and grief over the death of her parents, and agrees to look after her at the request of her grandmother Louisa. Julie is a new arrival at her school, where a group of classmates, encouraged by a harsh football coach named Dugan, make her their target. Miyagi becomes her teacher, passing on karate and a way of handling her emotions that goes beyond fighting. Michael Ironside plays Dugan opposite Hilary Swank as Julie, with Constance Towers, Chris Conrad and Arsenio "Sonny" Trinidad rounding out the main cast.

Christopher Cain directed the film from a screenplay by Mark Lee, with Jerry Weintraub producing. It arrived in 1994, between Cain's Pure Country and Gone Fishin', as the fourth entry in a series that began with The Karate Kid. It was made for a reported 12 million dollars and returned roughly 16 million worldwide, a modest result by the standards of the earlier films.

Audiences have been tepid on it: it holds 4.6 out of 10 on IMDb from about 38,000 votes and 5.4 out of 10 on TMDB from roughly 1,200 votes. A critics' rating of 4 out of 10 from 51 reviews places it in similar territory, with neither critics nor audiences rating it highly.