After watching the Karate Kid, featuring Jackie Chan and Aiden Smith, my first instinct was to compare it to the Eighties` version, the one with Mr. Miyagi, played by Pat Morita. After I concluded that neither movie could be classified as the better movie, I separated the two again, and took a step back to see each one individually.

The older version has become a classic. Who couldn`t fall in love with Mr. Miyagi`s carefree attitude, mild personality, and self-serving training techniques? Those aspects alone were able to make some of the holes in the plot-line acceptable, or at least tolerable.
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You’d have to be ghoulish to want to see Jackie Chan, who’s now (a plenty spry) 56 years old, still trying anything like the hanging-off-helicopters, 100-foot-jump-without-a-net stunts that made him an unparalleled action star. But that raises a philosophical question: what’s a Chan movie without jaw-dropping Chan-style action sequences?

Of late, it’s been the “The Spy Next Door” and a handful of other studio films that have a whiff of mugging desperation, as if no one involved really believes audiences would want to see Chan in a role that doesn’t involve him dangling from the side of a speeding city bus. In between, there’ve been scattered Asian features that scarcely seen the light of a movie projector Stateside, if at all.

Chan’s achieved some recent multiplex redemption instructing Jaden Smith in the ways of kung fu and honorable living in “The Karate Kid,” but it’s his other new film, the China/Hong Kong coproduction “Little Big Soldier,” that showcases he’s absolutely capable of carrying a movie on the strength of his beaming, unpretentious charisma. (And, okay, occasional and more restrained feats of acrobatics.) Chan’s never going to be the most nuanced of actors, but he can be a immensely engaging leading man, capitalizing on that almost silent comedy-inspired charm he’s made his own.

For now, here in the U.S., you’ll only be able to find “Little Big Soldier” on the festival circuit. Specifically: at the New York Asian Film Festival, an annual celebration of East Asia’s finest genre films, blockbusters, indies, oddities and none of your more typical type of exported cinema, which programmer Grady Hendrix catchily sums up as “the occasional boring art film about lonely Chinese people eating mud and being exploited by the State.”

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