Dreamworks waters down its best series with “Kung Fu Panda 4”
Directed by Mike Mitchell
Written by Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger, and Darren Lemke
Starring Jack Black, Awkwafina, Viola Davis, Dustin Hoffman, James Hong, Bryan Cranston, Ian McShane, and Ke Huy Quan
The idea that the first Kung Fu Panda came out at all should have been an exercise in scraping the bottom of the barrel, yet I remember like it was yesterday biking to a nearby theater with my mom and my sister to see it, my mom dreading the moment the film would start, and all three of us walking out loving it. I was eleven then, I’m twenty-seven now, and I truly can’t believe how well the first film and the trilogy that followed work. Where there should be annoying, one-dimensional caricatures, there’s a cast of flawed but incredibly likeable characters who grow as individuals and as a team movie-to-movie. Where there should be basic character design yoked to whatever the bit-of-the-second is, there’s lush art direction that draws on real world inspirations to craft a setting that’s still kid-friendly but carries within it some of the best animated action of the last twenty years. Where there should be pop music your kids will be singing until you get down on your knees and beg for reprieve from these tiny jukeboxes, Hans Zimmer (Dune: Part Two) and John Powell (Migration) deliver a score that oscillates between playful, intense, and deeply evocative without feeling uneven.
Kung Fu Panda 4 carries some of that goodwill with it. Po is still the role Jack Black (The Super Mario Bros. Movie) was born to play, and he brings the same earnestness and infectious enthusiasm to the part that he has for over a decade and a half now. Returning players Shifu (Dustin Hoffman, The Meyerowitz Stories), Ping (James Hong, Wendell & Wild), and Li (Bryan Cranston, Argylle), are fun to revisit, as well, and the friendship/co-parenting partnership that has formed between the latter two lends itself to the funniest moments of the movie. Cranston especially seems to be consciously poking fun at his Heisenberg persona. It is undeniably fun to return to this world.
It's in whether there was any reason to make that return beyond financial gain that we arrive at a more difficult question. Kung Fu Panda 4 finds Po at a crossroads, told by Shifu that it’s time for him to take a step back from kicking butt across the Valley of Peace and take his place as spiritual leader, a change Po is hesitant to make. In other words, it’s the same arc Po went through in Kung Fu Panda 3. Meanwhile, an unlikely hero, master thief Zhen (Awkwafina, Migration) finds her way to the Jade Palace and begins her training under its teachers, despite resistance from Shifu, only for all involved to learn that anyone can be a hero. In other words, the same arc Po went through in the original Kung Fu Panda. Everything that happens in this fourth installment isn’t just derivative of other films; it’s derivative of other films in the same franchise. It’s not the soft reboot it aspires to be but an unimaginative speedrun of two-thirds of the series.
Gone is the charming cast; the Furious Five are hastily explained to be elsewhere and are replaced with literal cardboard cutouts of themselves in a joke that would play as self-aware if it didn’t bely the cynical cost-cutting that surely brought it about (this is the cheapest film of the saga by almost $50 million). Also standing in their place is Zhen, whose arc you can predict from the moment she arrives and who is completely interchangeable with Awkwafina’s sassy sidekick roles in Migration, The Little Mermaid, Raya and the Last Dragon, and so on and so forth back through her career.
Meanwhile, the action lacks the weight of its forebears despite having apparently been choreographed in by a physical stunt team, and Zimmer and co-composer Steve Mazzaro (The Creator) sleepwalk through their composing duties, failing to put even established themes to good use and stooping inexplicably to an instrumental cover of “Crazy Train” at one point. I suppose the sequence in question was somewhat crazy. All told, it resembles director Mike Mitchell’s Trolls more than anything in the series to which it actually belongs.
Most conspicuously missing is any of the emotion that the franchise has brought to bear in its best moments. Saying that Kung Fu Panda 4 is a speedrun of the plots of 1 and 3 isn’t just indicative of its foundations being cribbed from the writers’ own work but the sheer pace at which this churns through its plot points. You’d assume a story that opens with the return of Po’s nemesis, Tai Lung (Ian McShane, John Wick: Chapter 4), would take at least half a scene to explore how Po and Shifu, the guy who raised him, feel about that. Instead, Kung Fu Panda 4 launches immediately into its next scene, then the next – both almost entirely exposition – and then we’re off on an adventure which itself doesn’t hit the brakes until the credits roll. All is plot. All is movement. There is no room for character or emotion because those things don’t work as well as objects to be flashed in front of the camera. There’s no sense of rhythm and no build-up to the narrative, jokes, and more serious beats the writers try to pull off later, leaving them as weightless as the action. Character A cares about Character B now. This might matter if their interactions consisted of anything other than stale cliches holding place so the runtime can tick toward feature length.
Within all this, the filmmakers are trying to tell a story about being willing to leave the past behind in favor of whatever the future might bring. Change doesn’t need to be scary, it argues, and what’s great for a little while sooner or later might lose its flavor. Setting aside for a moment that this was also a major theme in Kung Fu Panda 3, it’s representation here is the movie at its most interesting. The main villain here is the Chameleon (a gloriously hammy Viola Davis, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the only newcomer not severely mis-or underused), a shapeshifter seeking to bring back great evildoers from Po’s past in order to steal their power through incomprehensible means and become the greatest warrior of her age. In doing so, she becomes representative of a franchise obsessed with looking backward, one that resorts to fan service like returning villains and replaying their greatest hits instead of moving forward to some unknown new era.
Accidental or not, this is a smart idea, and the use of old antagonists means the movie gets to have its cake and eat it too with callbacks (though McShane is the only returning villain to have lines; Gary Oldman’s Shen and J.K. Simmons’s Kai have seemingly fallen victim to cost-forced muteness). It’s unarguable that moving forward and trying to find new angles is the key to longevity in a franchise; ideas are absolutely necessary for art to remain fresh. The problem with Kung Fu Panda 4 isn’t that it tries to take things in a new direction or that the elements that have historically been cornerstones are largely absent. I can even see the move away from action making sense given Po’s character arc. No, the problem with Kung Fu Panda 4 is that it fails to replace the old with something worthwhile. It’s bland. The additions are only fresh on a skin-deep level; dig any deeper, and it’s familiar ground. It doesn’t set the stage for new adventures. It sets the stage for old ones revisited with a new coat of paint. Any cracks in the façade are papered over with bland drivel that only draws attention to the shrug the whole thing was conceived and constructed with. In short, it’s the movie we all expected the original to be. Will kids enjoy it? Sure, but they’d also enjoy the first three Kung Fu Panda entries. Might I recommend those instead?
Rating: C+
Kung Fu Panda 4 is now playing in theaters.
