While my memory tells me that I moderately enjoyed the previous three installments of the Kung Fu Panda franchise, I couldn’t tell you a blessed thing about their plots. I have some recollection about the characters, beginning with Po (voiced by Jack Black), the current Dragon Warrior. But up to this point, Po has been a member of a team known as the Furious Five, which are nowhere to be found in Kung Fu Panda 4 (well, at least their voices aren’t), which comes eight years after the last film. This time around, Po is tapped by his master, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), to pass on his title of Dragon Warrior and accept his new role as the Spiritual Leader of the Valley of Peace. That means less fighting and more contemplating, neither of which excites Po. Key to this transition is that Po must find a replacement Dragon Warrior and train this person/animal before he can move onto his new role.
While this is going on, an evil sorceress, Chameleon (Viola Davis), is pulling together a plan that gets her Po’s recently acquired Staff of Wisdom. She'll use it to open up a portal to the Spiritual Realm (basically the afterlife) and bring out all of the kung fu villains Po has defeated over the years (including Ian McShane’s Tai Lung), so she can steal their abilities and become the most powerful warrior of all.
Po gets word of this and sets out on a journey to find Chameleon, bringing with him a new fighting force in the form of a corsac fox named Zhen (Awkwafina), who is basically a petty thief but is also a gifted martial artist. The two go on something of a hero's journey into various lands in search of clues to find Chameleon, which brings them to a den of thieves run by Han (Ke Huy Quan), who takes some convincing to help Po and not kill his old friend Zhen. Unbeknownst to Po, his two dads—Bryan Cranston’s Li and James Hong’s Mr. Ping—decide to follow Po to make sure he doesn’t run afoul of any villainous types. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all Po comes across. The film builds to an epic action battle between a fully juiced Chameleon and Po, in which the detailed martial arts look pretty impressive, even in animated form.
Kung Fu Panda 4 is directed by Mike Mitchell, who has a long history of helming some pretty impressive family-oriented works, including Sky High, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Trolls, Shrek Forever After (he also directed Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, which we won’t discuss), so the film is not without its merits. But it’s also fairly predictable and not especially inspired with its obvious messages about believing in oneself and finding inner peace. That being said, Awkwafina is a great addition to the voice cast because Zhen is a great foil for Po; and Ke Huy Quan’s Han is so funny and energetic that you can feel the way his brain misinterprets Po’s many lessons about not relying on violence or crime to get things done and one’s point across. Mostly, KFP4 feels like a safe step forward, and if Dreamworks Animation decides to make more of these, I hope they keep Zhen and strive a little harder to make the screenplay something better than this cut-and-paste action-adventure movie.
The film is now in theaters.
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