Movie & Reviews
Kung Fu Panda: A step ahead for DreamWorks, but this still misses the mark.
By Elyse Reel
Jun 11, 2008 - 3:14:20 PM

A movie like Kung Fu Panda should work on all fronts. It has an entertaining concept, the visuals are astounding, and it has a fighting panda as its main character, for crying out loud.
But it just . . . doesn’t.

It’s hard to say which flaw really does the movie in. It could be the paper-thin and predictable story, which sometimes gets bogged down in its own ludicrousness and endless fight scenes. It could be the pathetically underdeveloped characters. Maybe it’s the dialogue, which succeeds in mocking kung fu films’ solemn platitudes only some of the time. Or perhaps it’s the wearisome, trite overarching message (blah blah, we’re all winners, blah blah, if you believe in yourself, you can do anything, blah blah, etc.) But whatever the main culprit is, the result is the same: Kung Fu Panda never rises above mediocre.

Jack Black is Po, a well-meaning but bumbling panda trapped working for his goose (literally) of a father in the family noodle shop, but who dreams of fighting alongside the Fantastic Five – kung fu masters Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross). He gets his chance when a series of supposedly-hilarious-but-not-really mishaps lead the sage Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) to name him as the legendary Dragon Warrior; but the Fantastic Five and their sour old master, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), are none too happy about the appointment. Complicating matters is the escape of Tai Lung (Ian McShane), a supervillain bent on taking the Dragon Warrior’s title for himself.

There is one joke in Kung Fu Panda that is beaten into the ground: Po is fat. Hilarity. We get a solid 90 minutes of gags centering around Po’s having a large stomach, or an expansive rear end, or a vast appetite. It’s not funny, and often feels downright mean-spirited. Worst of all, it’s used so often that the other, funnier jokes get lost in the shuffle.

The casting is spotty; while Black brings the right amount of childish exuberance to Po, the other characters often sound jarringly out of place. Jolie sounds like she’s phoning it in, Hoffman’s rasp is all wrong for a Chinese kung fu master – though, to be fair, DreamWorks went almost entirely for non-Asian castmembers – and hearing David Cross’ voice come out of a crane’s mouth is a decidedly unpleasant experience. He’s about the most un-crane-like actor Hollywood could pick for the role.

Not that any of the miscasting really matters, since the Fantastic Five barely register as blips on the radar. They show up to make snarky quips about Po’s weight (yawn) and for a few decent fight scenes (yawn again; Kung Fu Panda feels like it’s about 95% fight scenes, and the more there are, the harder it is to get enthusiastic about them), and that’s about it. I’d be surprised if Mantis or Monkey got more than five lines in the whole film – no exaggeration.

Still, with its lovely visuals and surprising lack of non-stop pop culture references, Kung Fu Panda is one step in the right direction for DreamWorks. But it looks like they’ve still got a long way to go.

Kung Fu Panda runs 92 minutes and is rated PG for sequences of martial arts action. Viewed at Commonwealth 20.

ereel@villagepublishing.com | 751-0421


© Copyright by Village Publishing LLC