You don’t need a H๏τ tub time machine to tell you that we are in the midst of an ’80s pop-culture revival. It’s hardly surprising, since the kids who grew up watching the movies and television of that decade — “The A-Team” and “The Karate Kid,” to restrict ourselves to films opening this week — are now old enough to make and approve projects of their own. A lot of franchises that started out back in those kind-of-innocent, not-so-simple times have kept on going ever since. “The Terminator,” for instance, and Bruce Willis.

But the new “Karate Kid” is not driven completely by nostalgia. The first movie, released in 1984, with Pat Morita as the wise old mentor and Ralph Macchio as his protégé, tapped into so many archetypes (the polite word for clichés) that it could have been made at any time. The new version duplicates its story, but moves the action to China, where the тιтle character, a 12-year-old named Dre (Jaden Smith, the son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, producers on the film), has moved with his mother, Sherry (Taraji P. Henson).

The relocation turns out to make a big difference. “The Karate Kid” is very long ( 2 hours 12 minutes), dramatically thin and unevenly acted, but it was filmed almost entirely in China, mostly Beijing, and it has an unexotic, lived-in sense of place unusual in current Hollywood movies. (And this is not quite a Hollywood movie, but rather a Chinese-American co-production.) There are visits to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and a mountain temple, but mostly there is the lively bustle of workaday Beijing.

Dre and Sherry have moved there from Detroit, fleeing sad memories of Dre’s father’s death and seeking the kind of job opportunity that has vanished from the Motor City. It is a rough transition for Dre. He falls victim to a group of bullies whose ringleader is Cheng (Wang Zhenwei), a star pupil at a quasi-fascist kung fu academy. Dre’s crush on Mei Ying (Han Wenwen), an aspiring violinist, does not help matters, since she’s a childhood friend of Cheng, the main bully.

Enter, grumbling and shuffling, a humble handyman who turns out to be Jackie Chan. You don’t have to be familiar with the first “Karate Kid” — or even with the trailer for this one — to know what will happen. There will be rigorous training, beginning with the repeтιтion of a simple, menial task, in this case taking off and hanging up a jacket (rather than the car waxing in the first movie). There will be revelations, misunderstandings and montage sequences that somehow do not make the story go any faster. Then the final showdown with the bad kung fu kids (shouldn’t it be called “The Kung Fu Kid”?). Honor restored. Revenge exacted. Tears shed. Lessons learned.

As I said: archetypal. And not so terrible, especially for younger children not yet jaded by repeated exposure to triumph-of-the-underdog sports movies. But it should have been better, with a richer sense of the relationships between Dre and the adults in his life, and a sense of cultural curiosity to match the eager geographical exploration. It doesn’t help that Ms. Henson, by far the most dynamic presence in the film — but you could say that about almost anything she’s in, like “The Curious Case of Benjamin ʙuттon” and “Hustle & Flow” — is limited to a few scenes of scolding and worrying.

And the director, Harald Zwart (“The Pink Panther 2”), does not make enough use of Mr. Chan’s best ᴀssets, namely his ᴅᴇᴀᴅpan features and whirling limbs. His awkwardness in English would be less of a problem if Jaden Smith were not such a stiff, recessive actor. He can be lively and charming, but it is not always possible to tell where Dre’s cool, self-protective demeanor stops and Jaden’s limitations begin.

Still, you have no choice but to root for him — the actor and the young kung fu adept. Is this “Karate Kid” as good as the original? No, although it is better than the sequels. But why bother with nostalgia? It’s probably good enough.

“The Karate Kid” is rated PG. It has bullying and fighting.

THE KARATE KID