Image Credit: Jasin BolandWhat is Jaden Smith’s crime? Last weekend, the up-and-coming young actor, who will turn 12 this July 8, starred in a remake of The Karate Kid that audiences flocked to beyond expectation and, from all available evidence, loved. Given that Smith is front and center in more or less every frame of the two-hour-and-20-minute movie (and given that his performance, as a kid who hides his sadness behind a mask of surliness, is — to this critic, at least — a magnetic and affecting piece of acting), I hope we can all agree that Jaden Smith’s presence on screen had a little something to do with the movie’s success. Yet Smith’s rise has been greeted, in far too many quarters (including a number of comment boards on EW.com, like the one on my review), with bitter, gnashing resentment. This 11-year-old really has the haters foaming.
Excuse me, but what the heck is going on? Let’s start with the indisputable fact that Smith got to be in the position he’s in because his father is the biggest movie star on the planet. So where, exactly, should that piece of information lead us? Should we hate Jaden Smith? Should we hate Will Smith? Should we hate every young actor or musician who ever got placed on the map of fame because of his or her parents? (Take that, Miley Cyrus, Michael Douglas, and Jamie Lee Curtis.) Oh, but, of course, the rap on Jaden Smith is that he’s all nepotism and nothing else, that he’s a kind of grouchy preteen Tori Spelling in cornrows. He’s been excoriated as a bad actor (even though, just a few years ago, most viewers had nothing but praise for the appealingly feisty and precocious performance he gave right next to his dad in The Pursuit of Happyness). He’s been called a brat, a spoiled no-talent, an ungrateful beneficiary of his lineage of stardom. He’s been ripped up and down as “insufferable” for his appearance last week on The Late Show With David Letterman. READ FULL STORY »
