By David Ross. THE PITCH: The Kung Fu Panda is back and bulkier than ever: a blubbery accident in progress, though with some genuine kung fu mojo beginning to control the belly-led momentum that is his comic signature. Po’s antagonist is a Napoleonic peacock who plans to conquer China with the help of a fiendish new invention: canon. So it’s bear vs. bird, with the Middle Kingdom hanging in the balance.
THE SKINNY: The first KFP grossed $630,000,000 worldwide, and DreamWorks naturally declined to fiddle with a lucrative formula. The formula is entertaining enough, and nobody is likely to grumble.
WHAT WORKS:
• Pilferings from Jackie Chan. KFP II is basically a non-stop action sequence that makes hay with props and spaces in the classic Chan mode, and of course Po is a version of Chan in his semi-comic, semi-bumbling guise. Chan himself plays Master Monkey and presumably broke no bones in the process. Kids will love this mid-air mayhem, though parents may worry that the sequel is going to be called Visit to the Emergency Room.
• Pilferings from Zhang Yimou. Even more than the first film, KFP II richly imagines the look of ancient China. For kids, this orgy of Orientalism – gold-fretted pagodas, dragon-carved junks, mist-shrouded mountain pavilions – is bound to be a wonderment.
• Dustin Hoffman’s Master Shifu is a funny little addition to the Yoda lineage, a version of Chief Inspector Dreyfus driven crazy by an ursine Clouseau. Perhaps Shifu will develop a nervous tic in KFP III. Incidentally, my Taiwanese wife says that “Shifu” means “master,” so to call the character “Master Shifu” – “Master Master” – is pretty dumb.
• Angelina Jolie transcends her Tony-the-Tiger suit and ekes out a genuinely sexy performance, her throaty growl picking up where her curves leave off. Her sex appeal is inextinguishable, a constantly conserved force that shifts and inevitably manifests itself.
• The film naturally assumes that ordnance is evil, but it keeps the distracting and irrelevant sermonizing in check. The film is not the tiresome referendum on guns that it might have become.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
• Jack Black’s endless mugging and wise-cracking is the heart of the film, but also its undoing. In the end he’s more annoying than funny, and his Bluto Blutarsky routine winds up distracting from what might otherwise have been a splendid fairy tale. DreamWorks, which brought us the despicable Shrek, insists on pop-cultural in-jokes, Lettermanesque (now Stewartesque) insouciance, and winking solecisms. This is so much nervous pandering. Why can’t a story about ancient China actually be about ancient China? Why does DreamWorks have so little faith in its own stories and in its audience?
• Let’s face it: Hollywood celebrity is less thespian than metabolic. It’s largely about not gaining the fifteen or twenty pounds that make mere mortals of the rest of us. T&A being a moot point in animated films, A-listers tend to bring nothing to their roles. Why cast Jean-Claude Van Damme as Master Croc or Lucy Liu as Master Viper? This is vanity credit padding, not constructive casting. Being more bun than ab, Seth Rogen is a different case in point, but his smallish role as Master Mantis is equally immaterial. The producers might have helped their cause by casting competent stage actors or promising unknowns.
• In a pointless bid for emotional substance, the film endows both Po and Master Shen (the Napoleonic peacock) with major mommy and daddy issues. The film thus pauses for psychotherapeutic squish and the kind of realizations that occur in teary family counseling sessions. Modern Hollywood’s main problem is that its formative experience is the psychotherapist’s couch. It naturally reverts to what it genuinely knows, with tedious implications for the rest of us.
• Peacocks just aren’t that scary.
• Po’s adopted father – a squawky, garrulous, weirdly distaff goose – may be the most annoying film character since Jar Jar Binks.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
It’s not Pixar, but it will do. Kids will love the fury-fisted gymnastics and the Asiatic spectacle, while intelligent adults (i.e. Libertas readers) will enjoy the pastiche of the kung fu genre even as they are peeved that Po sounds more Angeleno than Asian (he does not actually say “dude,” but he might as well have done). Weekend afternoons have been spent in worse ways.
Posted on June 3rd, 2011 at 2:10pm.
Very nice review, as always David. I can’t watch most of these animated films because I find the leaning on contemporary references too annoying. It’s the same brand of humor in every film, and I just don’t find it funny. It’s distracting. I’m sure the visuals are great though.
A couple of nits. The Kung Fu Panda movies, while similar to Chan’s offerings are actually closer to Sammo Hung’s oeuvre, since he often plays a fat slacker kung fu artist. Also, Master Shifu is voiced by Duston Hoffman. I know, he doesn’t sound anything like he did in “The Graduate”, while Gary Oldman was the heavy, Lord Shen.
Lame on my part! Thanks for the correction. Jason, if you’re out there, can you adjust?
Got it …
In the end I found this movie highly enjoyable and compared to Stranger Tides it was like watching the Citizen Kane, Godfather, Godfather II, Star Wars, of animation movies.