The Kung Fu Panda series has been delightful just like the taste of fresh dumplings. But now I find myself outraged that the producers made such a disgrace with Kung Fu Panda 4 and let people go see it. The plot didn’t make sense, most of the movie was extremely boring, and it didn’t show lots of food that Po’s character thrived on.
The first three movies had something in them that just touched my soul, even with the side series it had a lot of emotion in it. The main character Po, and the Kung Fu Panda franchise have something extraordinary and quite wholesome to it that most cartoons don’t and its humor, gaining power with the thought of food and having a lot of kung fu that spices up things.
Kung fu is one of the biggest positives the movies have, and it relies on that to make a good movie. There were many times when I found myself crying and screaming with excitement at how kung fu was made in the older movies. The way they showed how Po could maneuver even with him being a big panda was fascinating, and belly-pounding his enemies to death was hilarious.
The new movie has no right to be called Kung Fu Panda though. There was no exciting kung fu like the rest of the series had. The fighting scenes were atrocious and bland, it also didn’t make sense that The Chameleon was discriminated against from learning kung fu just because she’s small.
We see powerful characters like Mantis, who is a literal bug. Yet the producers thought it was a good idea to make the villain a sorcerer who was discriminated against just for how small she was. A better idea could be that The Chameleon learned a corrupted form of kung fu, and Po had to figure out a way to outplay this new power he hadn’t seen.
One of the worst qualities of the movie was its character build-up. In the first movie, Po was a dumb, fat, no-skilled panda but rose from the odds and defeated a powerful enemy that his master couldn’t beat. We see this again in the third movie where his master got destroyed and Po came to the rescue.
Even after years of training and defeating some of the most powerful villains, Po had a hard time fighting weak enemies. They ruined the franchise and it makes me so mad that I wasted my time watching something even I could put together better.
At least the models and concepts of the characters were very pleasing, the visual of the antagonist The Chameleon was wonderful, and seeing new animals we haven’t seen before was a nice addition to the new movie. The artist did a wonderful job making the character come to life and to add to that the voice actor Viola Davis, who is an amazing actor, and voice actor captured the sassiness of the character.
But naming her The Chameleon was just a lazy thing to do. In the first three movies, the villains had names that had a kick to them, and not just the name of their species. Tai Lung, who is the villain in the first movie, has a name that is fun to say and is something you don’t see all the time.
Not only were the names bad but the moral of the story didn’t feel right. Why was trying to make bad people into good ones the focus of this movie? This could have worked very well, but the way they executed it was dull and dense. Why put this thought in the story when it didn’t appear in the older movies?
I understand the movie had a lower budget, but why tease fans with a fourth movie just to make a piece of garbage? The first movie had a budget of around $130 million, but the budget for the fourth dropped to $85 million, which took a toll on the film.
It felt like a repeat of the third movie but way worse, like they had a microscopic budget on this last movie. The movie had three things that made it good: first, it had kung fu. Second, it had a love for food. And third, it showed the power of love with family and friends. The fourth movie only had one of those, and the way the producers cut corners made me want to pour bleach into my eyes.
They didn’t have the Furious Five, which is Po’s team and best friends. Why take them out if they were a part of the last three movies and played a huge role in helping build Po’s character? I mean yes, he had his two dads to help him which is amazing, but that’s it. At that, his dads didn’t do much for him besides giving him advice he should have taken from the beginning. If one of his teammates tried to give him this advice he probably would have taken it, and we wouldn’t have had such a boring movie.
It would have been better if the group fought the last battle with Po before he retired, making one last memory. But they were so oblivious to their mistake and left the final fight scene with Po and the backstabbing fox to stop The Chameleon.
But no, we got a dumb fox that betrayed Po and almost got him killed 10 times. How was he supposed to become a master who gives wisdom to new warriors if he didn’t have a single brain cell in his head to see he was being played?
The villain approach was the worst thing. I’m so tired of them being good people in the beginning, like the villains in the first three movies of the series, then they feel the need for more power just because they can’t get what they want.
But some of the side characters’ designs and personalities were super fun to watch like the three baby rabbits that can go crazy but still look innocent. Some parts like this one were extremely funny and it helped me not go into a coma from how boring the movie was.
To wrap up, I just want to say the fact that they based the movie in China, yet made a fourth movie even though Chinese culture thinks the number four is bad luck is insane. The producer should have left it at three and I think we would have all saved some time and money from that torturous movie.
