Kung Fu Panda

Picture courstesy of suksim

Now, I like cartoons, I like Kung-fu movies, I quite like Jack Black as an actor, you’d think then that I would probably love this effort from Mark Osborne and Jack Stevenson, but … I don’t. For some reason I just couldn’t get into it. Sure thing, the animation’s pretty, it has an A-List cast, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman no less, but I personally thought there was just nothing too great about the movie as a whole.

The story is quite simple, Po the panda (Jack Black) is a noodle chef with dreams of being a kung-fu master and joining the Furious 5, a troupe of kung-fu masters led by their master Shifu (Hoffman), on the day that one of them is to be chosen as ‘the dragon warrior’, a freak accident means that Po is chosen instead. This means that Po, a lazy, slacker of a panda at best must be trained in the ways of kung fu and defend the valley of peace from the evil Tai Lung (Ian McShane). Hilarity apperently was meant to ensue.

I think the reason I didn’t really like this film is because the core ingredients of Kung-fu movie and kids cartoon sort of contradict each other. In a kung-fu movie I want to see a Jet Li, Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee facing hundreds of nunchuck wielding ninja assassins, I want action, I want to leave the film feeling like I could fight the world, hii-ya!  Unfortunately Kung-fu Panda did not deliver this and what it left in instead was a fairly tediuous mushy story with an ending so predictable I didn’t even need to see the film to guess it. I like custard, I like Jelly, I like Steak, but they should never be served in the same dish, I think the same can be said about cartoons, kung-fu and Jack Black. 4/10