Alright! Today I'm reviewing Kung Fu Panda 4, the sequel to the amazing Kung Fu Panda, perfect Kung Fu Panda 2, and pretty good Kung Fu Panda 3. Arriving 8 years after its predecessor, Kung Fu Panda 4 tells: Set 8 years after the events of Kung Fu Panda 3, Po has become bored in his role as the Dragon Warrior and Master Shifu asks him to pass on the role. At first he refuses, but when a daring thief breaks into the temple during the night, will Po finally find someone he can trust? Together they go to Juniper City to defeat The Chameleon, a rising empress with an eye for kung fu. Along the way they'll find old friends, new allies, and learn what it means to trust each other.
Now, the biggest problem with all of this is that that description reads exactly like a fanfic you'd see on AO3, not the fourth movie in a highly acclaimed film trilogy. It breaks the lore in numerous and disappointing ways, curtails returning characters, and focuses on an OC played by Awkwafina and a new, bustling city away from the peaceful scenery of the first three movies. If you liked the first three movies, you should be warned that the only returning factors are Jack Black's energy, Master Shifu's bristly nature, and Hans Zimmer's score. Everything else is nowhere near where it should be.
My first and biggest problem with the movie is the notion that the Dragon Warrior is something that gets passed down or can be passed down. The first movie introduced the role as part of a long-standing prophesy of a great martial arts master who would acquire unlimited power from the Dragon Scroll. Po is chosen (accidentally?) for this, trains, and eventually proves himself as the prophesied Dragon Warrior and defeats Tai Lung, bringing peace to the Valley of Peace. It never was depicted as something that had predecessors or successors like the Avatar; it was always a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing.
So to have Master Shifu tell Po to pass down the role of Dragon Warrior is completely manufactured and a shamefully obvious set-up for Awkwafina's rebellious thief who, over the course of their adventure together, will learn morality, friendship, and qualify herself to become the next Dragon Warrior. The same goes for Po's awkward proverbs and Master Shifu feeling shafted by Master Oogway; all of their character arcs don't feel real. The characters have already dealt with these things in prior films or are at points in their careers where most of this shouldn't be applicable, so rehashing and inventing drama for the sake of a "character arc" is not real conflict - it's hollow and vapid.
What's even more of a shame is the absence of the Furious 5, who were mostly cut from the story because Angelina Jolie voices Tigress and DreamWorks didn't want to shell out millions of dollars for a two-hour recording session (Understandable). It's a shame, though, as I had liked those characters and them being off on sidequests feels about as sublte as Rose having to "study" during The Rise of Skywalker. It also adds to the isolated, episodic feeling of the film - it's more of a spin-off than a sequel.
The villain of the movie, the Chameleon, is given a villainous introduction as she slowly pushes someone down a flight of stairs, which I'm sure we can all agree is just as brutal and memorable as Tai Lung's prison break and Lord Shen murdering people with a cannon. The best I can say about her is that she works as a physical threat for Po and Awkwafina to fight in the third act and that she's voiced by Viola Davis; everything else is a long and boring shade of bland. Additionally, her villainous motivation of "everyone told me I was too small to do kung fu" makes the absence of the Furious 5 - or at least Mantis and Viper - doubly frustrating. Seth Rogen might ask a pretty penny to return as Mantis, but to have a hero who diametrically opposes the villainess' motivations would have been the most interesting dynamic in the film (and given that he went on to star in Animal Farm, I highly doubt there's anything Seth Rogen wouldn't do).
We also have one more example of how Kung Fu Panda 4 once again disregards its predecessors - It's hard for me to believe that a chameleon can't learn kung fu when I have seen a mantis as an established and powerful kung fu master with some of the best fight scenes in the franchise. On that note, the fights in this movie were also largely unimaginative or clever aside from the manta ray fight in the first ten minutes, and any inspiration from Bruce Lee movies and wuxia fantasy are wholly abandoned.
There were a few assorted factors I did like about this sequel - mostly Hans Zimmer's score and Jack Black's end credits song. I also very much enjoyed the beautiful backgrounds, although that does come with the caveat that they feel more like something from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish's water-color imagination than the Kung Fu Panda universe, which has always been a bit more dingy and dirty. I also really liked the queer-coded running gag of Po's two dads tracking him down to make sure he's okay.
The other jokes were more hit-and-miss, unfortunately. The floating head gag is ripped from a Simpsons episode and feels woefully out of place in a Kung Fu Panda movie, and the fact that we got a screaming goat joke in 2024 is really unfortunate. It was already dated when Ralph Breaks the Internet did it in 2018; it was widely criticized as the unfunniest part of Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022; it's since shown up in Despicable Me 3, The Grinch, Marvel Rivals, and, most recently, the movie Goat. That's a lot of mileage for a video originally released in 2012 for which the majority of Gen-Alpha wasn't even cognisant for... or, y'know, born.
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