Kung Fu Panda

A fat Panda dreams of becoming the ultimate kung fu warrior, but he’s fat, lacking in athletic prowess and cooks noodles for a living. Then one day, the master turtle dude who runs the town picks the fat Panda as the “Dragon Warrior” who will defeat Tai Lung, the ultimate badass who’s coming back to town to kick some ass. What ensues is a lot fat Panda training, tons of “fish out of water” jokes and Seth Rogen as a kung fu grasshopper? Yeah bitch…got a problem with that?

A fun movie that manages to entertain pretty much the whole way through, doesn’t run past a buck and a half in runtime, but ultimately seems more geared toward kids and their McDonald’s Happy Meals. The film cracked me up here and there, particularly from the many one-liners delivered by the lead character, voiced ideally by the always entertaining Jack Black (at least to me), was fun to watch in terms of the many characters, the colourful environments, the lush Chinese decors, but ultimately didn’t deliver enough in terms of its story to me. The entire plotline can be described in a few words and not much happens from there: “Panda is fat and must train to become Dragon Warrior”. Some of that stuff just got to be a little redundant after a while. Training, fighting, training, fighting…fat jokes, more training, more fighting. Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed many of the fat jokes, most of the training stuff and the fighting, but how about a little more meat, fellas? Which is why I said that this film is probably geared more toward kids, maybe even those with ADD, since that seems to be something that was also afflicting the film’s lead character.

Some of the secondary characters were fun, like I mentioned before, but none really stood out all that much, other than Tai Lung, the kickass baddie who can NOT be stopped (I didn’t even realize that Angelina Jolie was the Tigress). By the way, that sorta bored me a little bit after a while as well. I mean, pretty much every character in the film were top-notch warriors who kicked ass and could not be hurt. How interesting is that after a while? As an adult, not so much. That said, I realize this review is railing into the movie a lot, but really, I had a good time, I would totally recommend it to kids and if you’re a parent, you’re definitely not gonna be bored-stupid by it either. Just don’t expect THE INCREDIBLES or TOY STORY type of full-blown entertainment…maybe more like SAMURAI JACK but with better animation (actually, kudos to the directors for some cool styling) and more fun characters. The hip Filipino chick with whom I watched this film only gave it a 5/10 because she didn’t think that it was original or funny enough and didn’t think any of its characters were particularly memorable either. She liked the music and the film’s upbeat nature though. Certainly not a classic, but a fun time for most, I would say.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian