Kung Fu Panda 4: Unnecessary and Uninspired

For as many animated franchises as have seen the light of day, few have been as successful critically and financially as Dreamworks' much-loved Kung Fu Panda movies. And this is rightfully so. I have a lot of love and respect for this franchise, one that's been overseen and created by skilled writers and animators who have obvious care for what they're doing. The movies may not all be on the level of even some of Dreamworks' other movies, but I admired this franchise for being able to sustain such a consistent standard of quality - and I enjoyed the movies because they were enjoyable on top of being well-made. And so I'm bursting my bubble as well as yours when I say that the newest Kung Fu Panda movie isn't very good. Now, this may be old news to most of you due to the March release date of Kung Fu Panda 4, but I treat this review thread just as much like a journal of what I watch as I do a review site, and so because I watched Kung Fu Panda 4 and didn't love it, that's what I'm going to talk be talking about today. I must say, this is the first time I've finished a movie in this franchise and then felt....empty afterward. I was painfully indifferent to this movie because it didn't give me even close to as many reasons to care about it as its predecessors. Just stick with me through this review, and I myself am sorry to say this, but no, my critiques are not merely inflated to keep people reading and create strong opinions. Sorry to disappoint you.

Kung Fu Panda 4 is yet another installment in the famous franchise and follows Po as he must find and train a successor to his title and position as the legendary Dragon Warrior. When a shape-shifting sorceress known only as The Chameleon makes it her mission to steal Po's kung-fu abilities, battle lines are drawn once more.

The other three movies in this franchise more or less acted as standalone stories, and Kung Fu Panda 4 keeps that tradition going. You don't really need to watch the other movies to understand it, although you might be better off watching the other movies instead, period. The story here is a self-contained one, so you shouldn't have to worry too much about having missed something crucial. But I digress. The animation in this movie is good enough, but I find myself somewhat disappointed that it lacks flair of any kind in a world of animated movies where the animators finally seem to be having fun doing their jobs - see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish or the Spiderverse movies if you want to understand better what I'm talking about.

Kung Fu Panda 4 doesn't look bad, but neither does its animation captivate. It's just kind of there, and its visuals are sorely lacking in any sort of vision. As for its narrative, the plot of this film is absolutely all over the place. It lacks focus and purpose, and tends to meander all over kingdom come without ever doing a whole lot of anything that matters to the story. There are a lot of sidepiece setpieces getting used in this movie, and most of them don't do anything effective for the story in almost any way. The movie doesn't have a lot of thrust or momentum to it because it's too busy trying to create moments without realizing that a movie does need to factor in the bigger picture.

If you're a big fan of this franchise, get ready to let out even more disappointed groans at this next part: the villain of Kung Fu Panda 4, a chameleon that is ever-so-creatively named The Chameleon, is sadly underwhelming, and this is hard for me to say about a franchise that had previously featured three excellent villains in the forms of Tai Lung, Lord Shen, and Kai. For a villain that can shapeshift, The Chameleon has surprisingly little character or impact compared to the villains that came before her. Ironically enough, her character doesn't work for me because she's trying to, metaphorically and literally, be all the villains that came before her, and ironically doesn't live up to any of them because she doesn't take the time to stake out her own identity. Now, that's not to say that there's nothing cool about her character, and she is used to good effect in a fight sequence that has some pretty cool animation and blocking techniques.

On top of everything wrong with it, this movie apparently just had to have a lot of annoying exposition dumps in it that feel really forced and cheap, and I wish the movie had relegated more of the time it gave to a lot of those meaningless, meandering sequences to instead giving us this necessary exposition that ended up getting delivered in some of the laziest ways possible. All in all, I'm struggling to find a lot of good things to say about this movie, and this hurts me a little bit because, as I've already said, I'm partial to the Kung Fu Panda franchise because of its past glory, and sometimes as a critic, it's hard to see a movie perform poorly on a critical level where it's predecessor excelled, especially when it's a movie franchise as beloved as Kung Fu Panda is. I'm sorry to disappoint you with this article, but I assure you, I'm disappointing myself as I write it, too.

This movie is a huge letdown from both the Kung Fu Panda franchise and Dreamworks Animation as a whole, and I personally think it's nothing short of bizarre that this movie and The Wild Robot could be released by the same company in the span of a single year. The industry is nothing if not unpredictable, and sometimes that's for better, and other times for worse - occasionally far worse. Kung Fu Panda 4 attempts to copy the essence of what came before it without bothering to create an identity of its own, and so it's a movie that just has a massive identity crisis all throughout it's time on the screen. It's certainly and even nobly trying to tie everything together by highlighting everything that came before, and unwittingly consigns itself to repeating and repeating everything we've already heard from its predecessors. I almost can't believe I'm saying this about a Kung Fu Panda movie, but you may be better off just skipping this one. Good movies are supposed to tell a new story instead of merely paying homage to past installations whilst living in the shadow of them, and this movie just has nothing to say at all. It's a pointless and creatively void attempt by Dreamworks to do....I'm not sure what exactly. But whatever that thing is, it's not working.

Kung Fu Panda 4 - 4/10

Romans 12:6-8