Kung Fu Panda 3

Let’s review the plot of Mark Osborne and John Stevenson’s Kung Fu Panda (2008). There is a scroll that supposedly bestows ultimate power on a Kung Fu master who obtains it. First is a master who has trained all his life since he was a child, learning every technique and exercising his body to the peak of fitness. He doesn’t qualify. Next are five masters who have trained all of their lives since they were children. They don’t qualify. Next is the panda. He has never practiced Kung Fu in his life. He is overweight. He is undisciplined. He is just a fan. After spending only a few days learning Kung Fu, during which time his motivation for training is to be coaxed with food, he qualifies. He receives the scroll, but it turns out to be blank. He beats the first master anyway. Kung Fu Panda, while visually and humorously appealing, teaches the lesson that laziness and lack of experience succeed over skill and effort. Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Alessandro Carloni’s Kung Fu Panda 3 is ridiculous in its reflection of the first movie’s message.

The narrative follows three main strands. The first revolves around Po (Jack Black) and his being charged with becoming a teacher of Kung Fu by Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). The second revolves around Po being reunited with his long-lost father Li (Bryan Cranston) and the father-son love triangle it creates between them and Po’s adoptive father Mr. Ping (James Hong). The third concerns the villain Kai (J. K. Simmons), a warrior from the spirit realm who has the power to steal chi from Kung Fu masters and enslave them as jade minions – Po must learn how to master chi in order to defeat him.

The first and third strands are the most infuriating. Po is the least qualified and as such the least deserving of a teaching position. The film even points out that Po is the least experienced of the group and that he should not be teaching the Furious Five, who are already Kung Fu masters – Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Viper (Lucy Liu), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Crane (David Cross) and Monkey (Jackie Chan). The film even criticises this, pointing out that that Tigress is a much better choice for the job. And yet the film is under the impression that “a teacher” is a part of his central identity.

The father-son love triangle subplot is ridiculously rushed. No time is given to the early development between Po and Li. The film avoids what should be a complex emotional meeting by having them become best friends within a matter of seconds. Po gives no consideration to Mr. Ping’s feelings on the matter. At one point there is a touching scene when Po and Li talk about Po’s mother, but in terms of drama these kinds of feelings are addressed far too late.

Then there is Po’s journey to master chi in order to defeat Kai. Just like in the first Kung Fu Panda, Po is tasked with mastering a skill within a very limited time to defeat an adversary who is by all means above his level of skill (and in this case commands and possesses the combined skills of many, on top of his own). So what is Po’s plan to master this skill? Go with Li to a secret panda village and end up being taught to be lazy and gluttonous, which he of course excels at, and learns nothing as a result! Whereas Kung Fu Panda 2 at least mentioned that Po was improving as a martial artist and losing weight, Kung Fu Panda 3 has Po gorging himself on dumplings and sleeping past noon!

From there it is difficult to summarise what is wrong with this journey without giving the story away. Essentially, other fighters constantly outclass Po, he is an objectively bad teacher and Tigress does nothing to help him, amounting to the success of tricks rather than and against actual Kung Fu, but Po’s plan fails because he is a terrible martial artist and doesn’t learn anything from obvious foreshadowing. A rare display of quick thinking takes the final showdown to the spirit realm, where the following plot hole challenges the viewer’s investment: the beginning of the film clearly established that Kai could escape the spirit realm, so he should be able to escape again and leave Po stranded there for eternity.

Given such disadvantage that the story pits against the “hero”, and without the effort given to improve the development of his journey, the film resorts to the mother of lazy resolutions. Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), the greatest Kung Fu teacher and supposedly wisest character in their world’s history, learned how to use chi through thirty years of meditation. The pandas, plus Tigress and even Mr. Ping, learn how to use chi in only a matter of seconds, with no effort or practice, based on some drawings that only Li saw, and Po of all people masters chi instantly, incomprehensibly possessing energy stronger than everyone else’s! And of course, being objectively incompetent and having significantly less skill, commitment and experience than his opponent, plus the annoying disrespectful mockery of his opponent, and having received no training that would allow him to do so, Po wins.

The film reduces the time it takes for one to master their skills from a lifetime’s worth to a few days – a disgusting thought to those who dedicate their lives to their craft. Through a course of events that include failure, incompetence, a training montage, rushed story development and deus ex machina, Kung Fu Panda 3 once again teaches that laziness and lack of experience succeed over skill and effort. This is why it is important for filmmakers to observe their own work to understand what they’re teaching their target audience.

For the sake of addressing more positive aspects, its visual design is quite appealing. With the exception of occasional flat backgrounds that clash with the overall style the film (sometimes devolving into anime speed lines), the CGI animation is fluid and detailed. Character design is mostly familiar and passable – for example, the pandas are given ample variations to tell one from the other – though Kai’s proportions in particular seem a little mismatched. The different environments throughout the film have a great deal of character to express tone based on situation, especially the spirit realm, which can be illustrated as supernaturally tranquil or chaotic. Voice acting is almost always seamless; if there is one example of a delivery that doesn’t match the mood of the visuals, it would be that of Jack Black during the climax at the moment of Po’s “revelation”, coming off slightly intense despite the animated character’s fluid movements and other uses of sound during the moment. But other than this example, the overall performances are sound.

The story introduces supernatural elements into its context. While character abilities and special effects have implied the utilisation of a natural metaphysical energy during combat and other scenes throughout the series, it mostly kept to a semi-realistic subject matter. It’s strange, but not necessarily an unwelcome addition. To its detriment however, the film sets up the rules for these supernatural elements and either ignores or forgets them. On top of that, the film beats the “yin-yang symbol” like a dead horse.

The film presents Kai as the series’ newest villain. To the film’s credit, it does represent him as an intimidating figure. His appearance is rather threatening, though his bulging muscles make him look top-heavy. His signature weapons are fun in that they resemble the swords-on-chains used by Kratos from God of War. While not as sympathetic or sly as Tai Lung from the first movie, he does have a certain villainous charm to his personality. On top of his design, his powers seem a legitimate threat when our heroes are forced to fight against the ominous jade duplicates of other masters and of each other. However, his goal and motivation aren’t exactly clear. His backstory would imply that he simply wants to accumulate chi and become stronger, but we don’t know why he originally wants to do that. At the beginning, it seems his goal is to get revenge on Master Oogway by destroying his legacy, which makes sense considering that Kai has been forgotten historically (even though he didn’t know he had been forgotten during his time in the spirit realm), but it doesn’t explain why he’s willing to go to such lengths against someone who used to be his friend. The sad thing is Kai could have been a sympathetic villain with clear motivations like Tai Lung and Lord Shen, if the transition of his past relationship with Master Oogway illustrated how it affected him and reflected on his character or on the story. Even worse is the film’s apparent need to undermine the threatening atmosphere surrounding Kai by having no one know who he is from history and by having Po mock him during battles.

At the end of the day (and for lack of a kinder adjective), Kung Fu Panda 3 is wretched. Even with Po’s narrative faults in the first two films, the character was at least likeable and understandably relatable. In this film, he is extremely annoying, ridiculously gullible, and completely disrespectful. The film objectively favours laziness over hard work and attempts to justify this backwards attitude with the ideal of self-belief. The comedic timing is completely wrong, often interrupting what should be emotional and dramatic moments. Its twists are predictable, its logic is skewed, its plot is weak, many of its jokes are repeated from the first film, its montage sequences are terribly edited, and its positive aspects are minor at best. A thoroughly unpleasant experience.