The panda man can
The fact that DreamWorks Animation was able to get three genuinely good feature films out of the logline "the stupid fat panda eats a lot and fucks up, but also accidentally is very great at kung fu" is a downright miracle. Honestly, the fact that it was able to get one genuinely good film out of that logline is a miracle, especially because 2008's Kung Fu Panda was, at the time, the best and maybe the only actually good CG animated feature DreamWorks had released. So the fact that here in 2024, 16 years after the series began and eight years after it came to a natural and comfortable close with Kung Fu Panda 3, the series has finally produced its first lousy entry with the unasked-for and unnecessary Kung Fu Panda 4 is, while disappointing, not by any means shocking. You can only dodge the same bullet so many times before it hits. And Kung Fu Panda 4 being a legacy sequel of sorts (eight years is a long time, though it doesn't feel like it) definitely didn't increase its chances of pulling off the impossible one more time.
So to begin with, the film has a pretty dreadful script (which has no fewer than five credited authors attached to it, so that's where we're at). Story-wise, it takes the path of absolutely the least imaginable resistance - in fact, it takes multiple paths of least resistance. Which could in theory make it feel at least a little fresher, just from combining stale ingredients in a new way, but the net result is that it all feels even more uninspired and desperate. So for one thing, it's a "re-run the greatest hits" job, where it makes just so many callbacks to the original trilogy and brings back the Ian McShane-voiced villain of the first Kung Fu Panda back for an extended cameo whose main impact is to defang him while also diluting the impact this film's actual villain. For a second thing, it's "tell the same story over again" for Kung Fu Panda 3 specifically, subjecting the titular panda, Po (Jack Black), to mostly the same character arc that he went through then, and some broadly similar plot beats. And then as far as the "new" material goes, it takes the singularly lazy route of "the old protagonist mentors his replacement", making this feel very much like Cars 3 has been remade using panda suits. Put 'em all together and you have a movie that is almost relaxingly free of unexpected plot developments or challenging narrative beats. And it follows this pretty much right down to the littlest details and into the dialogue: in particular, the villain, a chameleon named The Chameleon, has essentially zero lines of dialogue that aren't "cunning megalomaniac in a kids' movie" boilerplate. This is a horrible shame, because the producers hired no less a talent than Viola Davis to voice The Chameleon, and having Davis as a voice of a cartoon bad guy is such a slam-dunk of an idea. But even she's not able to make anything out of the standard-issue evil cackling and self-negating jokes that the writers have hung around her neck.
It's not worth belaboring the actual conflict - second Kung Fu Panda in a row where the villain uses magic to skill the kung fu powers from great kung fu masters in the afterlife - but the actual heart of the movie lies in what happens when Po is told by his grumpy old mentor, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), that despite all that has been implied about the ceremonial role of Dragon Warrior thus far in the franchise, it's actually basically just a job and Po needs to hand it off to somebody else, so he can focus on being a spiritual leader. Right around the same time, a wily fox bandit named Zhen (Awkwafina) crosses Po's path, and he recruits her to be his assistant in tracking down The Chameleon, since it's clear she knows more about the shape-changing essence-stealing sorceress than anyone else. If you can't immediately figure out both places this is going, God bless. But narrative surprise isn't really the primary goal of the Kung Fu Panda pictures, nor of the broader kung fu genre, so it's not the worst thing that this basically announces everywhere it will ever go by the end of the first act. The pleasure lies in the journey: the animated martial arts action, the silly character comedy, the pleasurable visual style.
So with that all being the case, the worst thing is that Kung Fu Panda 4 has lousy action, wheezy jokes, and it looks bad. A very significant thing that has happened in the eight years since we last saw this series in theaters is that Jennifer Yuh Nelson no longer works at DreamWorks, and I think it is very little exaggeration to say that she was the main creative force across the whole trilogy: she was material responsible for the look of the most interestingly stylized scene in the first Kung Fu Panda, and was also one of the main forces in staging that film's action setpieces, she took over as director for Kung Fu Panda 2 and immediately made the series look more daring and have more elaborate action setpieces, and while she technically was one of two directors on Kung Fu Panda 3, it's pretty apparent that her colleague was just there to help facilitate her vision, which had by that point gotten so ambitious that no one director could carry it off. All she merits in Kung Fu Panda 4 is an appearance in the "special thanks" list, along with basically everyone else who worked in a lead creative capacity on the first three movies. And oh my word, you can feel her absence. Of that list I just gave, probably the "best" thing about the movie is that it still has pretty solid action - it's not doing anything nearly as creative as the first three films, especially the extraordinary animated action setpieces in the second, but new director Mike Mitchell and co-director Stephanie Ma Stine still have some sense that their duty is to use the allowances of the medium to make things big and physically impossible and do very cool wire fu things that would be difficult to execute well in live action, and probably pretty stupid-looking even if they were executed well. They know when to deploy a wide shot and when to go into a detailed close-up. The problem is that the fight choreography is pretty pedestrian, but it's trying.
Jokes and visuals, though? Zip. Black, to his credit, is doing everything he can to make his signature character have the same buoyant, fanboyish energy, and so there's at least a simulacrum of comedy even if the lines he's saying aren't really supporting him. Hoffman sounds exhausted and Awkwafina is weirdly subdued and mumbly and melancholy - not a complaint! After the all-out sonic assault on my eardrums that were her vocal performances in Raya and the Last Dragon and the 2023 Little Mermaid, having her go for an under-performance is an unexpected treat. But it's not "funny". And beyond the acting, the writing is just so, so tired, and the bulk of the gags take on the limp quality of "WHOA, let me indicate the thing that's onscreen! Wow, that thing is not in line with my expectations! How nuts!" that is the last refuge of people who can't ever come up with a punchline.
And the animation just breaks my heart. I know that DreamWorks has tightened its belt since 2019, but I would never have assumed that Kung Fu Panda 4 could possibly look worse than the eight-years-older Kung Fu Panda 3. This is the same studio whose Puss in Boots: The Last Wish represents the reigning high-water mark for finding a way to make interesting aesthetic choices and stylization transform a lower budget into an artistic merit. It's not that Kung Fu Panda 4 looks "bad" - studios aren't releasing "bad" animation in the 2020s, the computers have gotten too good for that - but it looks so much less lavish and lush than its immediate predecessor, and there's nothing going on visually to compensate or replace that. Plus, Mitchell has nothing like Yuh's fascination with color design, minimalism, or the evocative flatness of traditional East Asian art forms, so there's nowhere near as much cool stuff as there were in those movies, with their bold use of solid colors. The one and only time this even gestures in that direction is a fight scene in the fog, where the characters are just silhouettes. That this is by some margin the best action sequence in the film is clearly not a coincidence.
So the end result is that there's just... nothing. This is such a dismally blank experience. Its 94-minute running time is by no means excessive, but I still don't actually know what they did to fill it: the plot seems to just involve Po and Zhen walking from place to place, followed after about 10 minutes by Po's adopted goose father Ping (Jame Hong) and his biological panda father Li (Bryan Cranston) walking to the same place, in a subplot whose aching, groaning lack of urgency makes it extraordinarily clear that if they'd been expecting a fourth movie, they would absolutely not have given Po a second dad in the third movie. Eventually, Po just kind of shows up in the same room as The Chameleon, and there's a showdown. It's so exhaustingly empty: not funny, not attractive, not exciting. It's like eating hot saltwater and calling it soup. It's not objectionable enough to hate it or any such thing, but there's also simply nothing here to actually like.
Reviews in this series
Kung Fu Panda (Osborne & Stevenson, 2008)
Kung Fu Panda 2 (Yuh, 2011)
Kung Fu Panda 3 (Yuh & Carloni, 2016)
Kung Fu Panda 4 (Mitchell, 2024)
So to begin with, the film has a pretty dreadful script (which has no fewer than five credited authors attached to it, so that's where we're at). Story-wise, it takes the path of absolutely the least imaginable resistance - in fact, it takes multiple paths of least resistance. Which could in theory make it feel at least a little fresher, just from combining stale ingredients in a new way, but the net result is that it all feels even more uninspired and desperate. So for one thing, it's a "re-run the greatest hits" job, where it makes just so many callbacks to the original trilogy and brings back the Ian McShane-voiced villain of the first Kung Fu Panda back for an extended cameo whose main impact is to defang him while also diluting the impact this film's actual villain. For a second thing, it's "tell the same story over again" for Kung Fu Panda 3 specifically, subjecting the titular panda, Po (Jack Black), to mostly the same character arc that he went through then, and some broadly similar plot beats. And then as far as the "new" material goes, it takes the singularly lazy route of "the old protagonist mentors his replacement", making this feel very much like Cars 3 has been remade using panda suits. Put 'em all together and you have a movie that is almost relaxingly free of unexpected plot developments or challenging narrative beats. And it follows this pretty much right down to the littlest details and into the dialogue: in particular, the villain, a chameleon named The Chameleon, has essentially zero lines of dialogue that aren't "cunning megalomaniac in a kids' movie" boilerplate. This is a horrible shame, because the producers hired no less a talent than Viola Davis to voice The Chameleon, and having Davis as a voice of a cartoon bad guy is such a slam-dunk of an idea. But even she's not able to make anything out of the standard-issue evil cackling and self-negating jokes that the writers have hung around her neck.
It's not worth belaboring the actual conflict - second Kung Fu Panda in a row where the villain uses magic to skill the kung fu powers from great kung fu masters in the afterlife - but the actual heart of the movie lies in what happens when Po is told by his grumpy old mentor, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), that despite all that has been implied about the ceremonial role of Dragon Warrior thus far in the franchise, it's actually basically just a job and Po needs to hand it off to somebody else, so he can focus on being a spiritual leader. Right around the same time, a wily fox bandit named Zhen (Awkwafina) crosses Po's path, and he recruits her to be his assistant in tracking down The Chameleon, since it's clear she knows more about the shape-changing essence-stealing sorceress than anyone else. If you can't immediately figure out both places this is going, God bless. But narrative surprise isn't really the primary goal of the Kung Fu Panda pictures, nor of the broader kung fu genre, so it's not the worst thing that this basically announces everywhere it will ever go by the end of the first act. The pleasure lies in the journey: the animated martial arts action, the silly character comedy, the pleasurable visual style.
So with that all being the case, the worst thing is that Kung Fu Panda 4 has lousy action, wheezy jokes, and it looks bad. A very significant thing that has happened in the eight years since we last saw this series in theaters is that Jennifer Yuh Nelson no longer works at DreamWorks, and I think it is very little exaggeration to say that she was the main creative force across the whole trilogy: she was material responsible for the look of the most interestingly stylized scene in the first Kung Fu Panda, and was also one of the main forces in staging that film's action setpieces, she took over as director for Kung Fu Panda 2 and immediately made the series look more daring and have more elaborate action setpieces, and while she technically was one of two directors on Kung Fu Panda 3, it's pretty apparent that her colleague was just there to help facilitate her vision, which had by that point gotten so ambitious that no one director could carry it off. All she merits in Kung Fu Panda 4 is an appearance in the "special thanks" list, along with basically everyone else who worked in a lead creative capacity on the first three movies. And oh my word, you can feel her absence. Of that list I just gave, probably the "best" thing about the movie is that it still has pretty solid action - it's not doing anything nearly as creative as the first three films, especially the extraordinary animated action setpieces in the second, but new director Mike Mitchell and co-director Stephanie Ma Stine still have some sense that their duty is to use the allowances of the medium to make things big and physically impossible and do very cool wire fu things that would be difficult to execute well in live action, and probably pretty stupid-looking even if they were executed well. They know when to deploy a wide shot and when to go into a detailed close-up. The problem is that the fight choreography is pretty pedestrian, but it's trying.
Jokes and visuals, though? Zip. Black, to his credit, is doing everything he can to make his signature character have the same buoyant, fanboyish energy, and so there's at least a simulacrum of comedy even if the lines he's saying aren't really supporting him. Hoffman sounds exhausted and Awkwafina is weirdly subdued and mumbly and melancholy - not a complaint! After the all-out sonic assault on my eardrums that were her vocal performances in Raya and the Last Dragon and the 2023 Little Mermaid, having her go for an under-performance is an unexpected treat. But it's not "funny". And beyond the acting, the writing is just so, so tired, and the bulk of the gags take on the limp quality of "WHOA, let me indicate the thing that's onscreen! Wow, that thing is not in line with my expectations! How nuts!" that is the last refuge of people who can't ever come up with a punchline.
And the animation just breaks my heart. I know that DreamWorks has tightened its belt since 2019, but I would never have assumed that Kung Fu Panda 4 could possibly look worse than the eight-years-older Kung Fu Panda 3. This is the same studio whose Puss in Boots: The Last Wish represents the reigning high-water mark for finding a way to make interesting aesthetic choices and stylization transform a lower budget into an artistic merit. It's not that Kung Fu Panda 4 looks "bad" - studios aren't releasing "bad" animation in the 2020s, the computers have gotten too good for that - but it looks so much less lavish and lush than its immediate predecessor, and there's nothing going on visually to compensate or replace that. Plus, Mitchell has nothing like Yuh's fascination with color design, minimalism, or the evocative flatness of traditional East Asian art forms, so there's nowhere near as much cool stuff as there were in those movies, with their bold use of solid colors. The one and only time this even gestures in that direction is a fight scene in the fog, where the characters are just silhouettes. That this is by some margin the best action sequence in the film is clearly not a coincidence.
So the end result is that there's just... nothing. This is such a dismally blank experience. Its 94-minute running time is by no means excessive, but I still don't actually know what they did to fill it: the plot seems to just involve Po and Zhen walking from place to place, followed after about 10 minutes by Po's adopted goose father Ping (Jame Hong) and his biological panda father Li (Bryan Cranston) walking to the same place, in a subplot whose aching, groaning lack of urgency makes it extraordinarily clear that if they'd been expecting a fourth movie, they would absolutely not have given Po a second dad in the third movie. Eventually, Po just kind of shows up in the same room as The Chameleon, and there's a showdown. It's so exhaustingly empty: not funny, not attractive, not exciting. It's like eating hot saltwater and calling it soup. It's not objectionable enough to hate it or any such thing, but there's also simply nothing here to actually like.
Reviews in this series
Kung Fu Panda (Osborne & Stevenson, 2008)
Kung Fu Panda 2 (Yuh, 2011)
Kung Fu Panda 3 (Yuh & Carloni, 2016)
Kung Fu Panda 4 (Mitchell, 2024)
