39. Kung Fu Panda 4
Hey, a fourth one of these came out. Alright.
I didn’t really have any desire to see it. I didn’t even see the third one until I decided to do this list actually.
Well, I’ve seen it now and boy howdy was it definitely a movie.
Yeah man.
Po (Jack Black) is BACK and he’s doing Po things again. They were all done better in the other films but it still looks really good when he does them here. Some of the action scenes here are even a little inspired and a tad creative too. Not as much as the other ones but at least they have a spark to them. The absolute best thing about this film is, of course, the way it looks. I especially love the way the final battle at the end looks with the mixture of harsh reds and blues. Very nice color scheme going on there.
There’s also Zhen, Po’s apprentice, voiced by Awkwafina, whose just voicing all the female leads in these movies now it feels like. She does a good job here. Her character is a thief fox girl who Po finds trying to steal Oogway’s staff. They tussle and she gets thrown in jail but is then allowed out of jail because she knows how to find The Chameleon (Viola Davis).
Who is the Chameleon? The Chameleon is this film’s villain. She can shapeshift into people. She’s a sorcerer who uses magic but we never see her do any because she only has like 3 or 4 scenes in this film before the climax happens. I assume shapeshifting is just a thing she can do because she’s a chameleon… but if it’s not and it’s her sorcery power and she just happens to be a chameleon then that’s still really lame.
Like, she shows up at the beginning of the movie disguised as Tai Lung (Ian McShane), the villain from the first Kung Fu Panda, and lays waste to a mining village or something. But then later in the film it’s revealed that she can’t actually do any kung fu because kung fu is tied to one's spirit… except, you know, it can be taught so not really. For some reason she can’t be taught. I forget why. Whatever.
Anyway, I’m not sure how she destroyed the village if she didn't have Tai Lung's techniques and power then. I guess she used magic to do it but I don’t recall that being what was shown. For a sorcerer she really doesn’t do a whole lot of magic.
She breathes fire at one point. I think that was a thing she stole from the fire breathing crocodile guy though.
Uhm. Also, Po’s dads are here.
I love the both of them. They’re great characters and their antics are fun and funny. However, because they take up so much of the movie it does often feel like the film is wasting time whenever we cut back to them. They go off on an adventure to save Po because they’re worried about him facing off against The Chameleon because she’s supposedly so fearsome. They’re not kung fu masters and they don’t bring any weapons so I’m not sure what they thought they were going to do but they do end up assisting in the end so I guess it’s okay.
I said “wasting time” and not “filling time” because I do see a spark of an idea here. This film definitely could have utilized its time better by focusing on all the stuff that actually mattered a lot more. The Chameleon is by far the weakest villain in this franchise and it’s not even close. She doesn’t have any real personal connection with anyone to bolster herself (except Zhen but ehhhh). She doesn’t have an interesting goal in mind either. She’s gonna lay waste to everything and take over. Ooo~! Okay, sure.
What she does have is a kernel of an interesting backstory. Sort of. The idea that she wanted to become a kung fu master but was turned away so she became a sorcerer instead and is now using that sorcery to become a kung fu master… by summoning all the past kung fu warriors and sucking away their kung fu spirits. That’s… interesting I guess. There’s something there.
It doesn’t come to fruition here though. It barely even feels like it matters by the end because of how easily she’s dealt with. Like, yeah, the fight at the end is really cool but then Po just pretends to get trapped so Zhen can fight The Chameleon herself and then Po just whacks The Chameleon over the head to end the fight when the lesson he was trying to teach is learned.
By this point, The Chameleon has sucked out all the kung fu talent of not just Po’s past villains but a TON of old kung fu masters. She even transforms into a huge hybrid of all of them at one point! What does she do when she does this? She flies around a bit and then crashes through the roof.
There’s only a tiny bit of her actually utilizing these old masters’ fighting abilities when the fight starts but then it just kind of gets abandoned. I didn’t at any point feel like Po was facing off against a ton of different kung fu masters in a battle that SHOULD have been his greatest and toughest challenge yet.
Instead, it just kind of happens.
It’s so weird too because there’s so much space to fill. There are long stretches of the film where so much mundane nonsense is happening and, yeah, it’s amusing. I’ll admit, this film got a lot of laughs out of me but the fact that those laughs were in service of so much that didn’t matter or contribute to anything was weird. It wasn’t even like one or two distractions either. That entire scene at the bar, for example, served a bit of a purpose I guess. Contrasting how Zhen chooses to handle conflict with how Po handles it, by him constantly trying to de-escalate everything, kind of works. But it goes on for quite a bit and then we come back to it again when the two fathers get there.
There’s a REALLY long scene where the guards of the city are chasing Po and Zhen all over the goddamn place. THAT went on forever and for no reason to. I have no clue why they chose to waste so much time when they had characters in need of proper development to focus on.
I went into this film already knowing that Zhen was going to betray Po but when it happened it was so quick that I barely registered it. And then, of course, the one small journey they went on changes her mind about him. That’s fine of course but it doesn’t really feel all too powerful. I accepted it because I already had. I saw this character and knew where the movie was going with her instantly so… yeah. I've seen it all before.
She’s fine. I don’t have a problem with her but I really wish there had been something more interesting to go off of here. I liked the idea behind them exploring the concepts of being in the slums a bit. A bit of an urban flare to go with the latest baddie could have done a lot to make this film feel unique. As is, it kind of feels like a strange mishmash of things we’ve done before.
Master Shi-Fu (Dustin Hoffman) especially feels off to me. Like, yeah, he’s always been grumpy but in this film he feels like he’s just here to force Po to do stuff he doesn’t want to do until he accepts it. Then Po does and then he’s still not happy I guess until he smiles as the credits roll. Okay.
I guess it was nice to see Tai Lung again. I love his voice.
The moment where he and the other villains bow to Po feels weird.
Tai Lung comes into the film so late that it feels wasted. So much could have been done to help color his point of view on Po. Every line he has in this film is great actually. The intrigue behind how he sees this person who sent him to the spirit realm by raising his finger at him should have been explored more. He’s way more interesting in just THIS film than The Chameleon is.
This film wasn’t god awful or anything. It doesn’t exactly succeed at what it’s trying to do but I can’t say I came out of it thinking it was a huge, massive failure either. I was entertained by it in parts.
Oh yeah and the Furious Five aren’t here. I mean they show up at the end but they’re not voiced. They’re just in the end credits montage. There was a whole thing about this online but uh I don’t care to get into it. That whole thing was a shame though.
This whole movie, really, is a bit of a shame.
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1 month, 3 weeks ago
23 Mar 2025 01:59 CET
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