Review: Kung Fu Panda

This was a good flick. It’s cute. It’s funny. Great animation (not Pixar great, but the best I’ve seen from Dreamworks). And despite its typical underappreciated-loser-craving-for-greatness-is-thrust-unto-an-arduous-path-to-fulfill-his-destiny story, the fanboy aspect of it is a novel twist to it that at I least I haven’t seen yet. Still, even the quality of the flick doesn’t make up for the marketing for it. I was hating this movie three months ago when Jack Black was telling me to turn off my cell phone before the movie started. But don’t let the ad nauseum advertizing stop you from seeing the film (unless you are boycotting it to send some sort of message to the marketers then more to you, they must be feeling your rebellious sting by now).

So we meet our portly panda protagonist Po (Jack Black) who dreams about being an awesome warrior as opposed to working in his father’s noodle shop. He owns the action figures to the Furious Five, China’s greatest warriors, and has nerdom knowledge of their exploits and the legends of all of the past Kung Fu greats. Well, some evil leopard is prophesized about escaping his imprisonment and the Dragon Warrior must be chosen in order to defeat him. Naturally it is assumed that one of the Furious Five, Monkey, Viper, Mantis, Crane, or Tigress (all based on actual Kung Fu techniques), will be chosen, but Po is chosen much to the chagrin of the Five and Master Shi Fu (Dustin Hoffman) in charge of training him. So the training and hostility begins and a fat panda must overcome the odds and defeat the most feared martial artist in the land.

By now you know the CGI kids film by now and Kung Fu Panda does not deviate from the good time and humour you probably expect. It lacks the inside adult jokes that the Shrek series had, but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. In fact Jack Black is funnier than he’s been in a long time. Again the story’s trite, but it’s a kid’s film so there not exactly going to try to reinvent the wheel here, even if Pixar and Miyazaki are. Anyway the main moral that the push is: fat people can do stuff, which of course is complete bullshit. But they try to fill little kids heads with dreams of glory and accomplishment so they learn the hard way how pathetic they are. Still, it’s a good movie. Dustin Hoffman does awesome voice-over work as Shi Fu. I mean truly great. I mean I never thought I’d dick ride celebrity voice-over work, but here I am. Black, James Hong (Po’s father), Seth Rogen (Mantis), and David Cross (Crane) also get props for their work. But that being said there wasn’t a whole lot to the other celebrity players, especially Jackie Chan. I mean on paper Jackie Chan as a kung fu monkey is an awesome idea, but when he only gets three lines it defeats the purpose, and it’s not like he’s doing the fighting either. So there’s that.

So good flick and entertaining. Admittedly I am backhanding this movie a little by saying it’s no Pixar, but it does fall short of the caliber film that studio has been making for over a decade, so I’m just being honest.

Rating: 6.5/10