In 2008 KUNG FU PANDA raked in well over half a billion dollars, opened the celebrations for the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and received a generous amount of critical success. So its no surprise that Dreamworks would busy themselves away with a sequel.
Three years later and all the gang are back for the further adventures of Po the Dragon Warrior (Jack Black) along with Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogan), Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross). This time though Po is up against Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), the embittered Peacock that had been banished for the genocide of the panda race but returns with the one weapon that can destroy Kung Fu!! To defeat Shen, Po must find inner peace by discovering his true origin’s.
Joining the cast this time around are two extra Kung Fu warriors in Master Ox (Dennis Haysbert) and Master Croc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) with the latter only having about four lines, which is a shame. The new cast of characters is a welcome addition even though the existing characters are still unexplored with Mantis having some of the best lines and Monkey not getting a chance to really say anything.
The film is predominately about Po learning his secret origin which leads to some funny moments when he finds out Mr Ping (James Hong), the noodle shop owning goose, is not Po’s real father. Though this brings some amount of humour, full advantage is not taken of the situation. This goes with a lot of the film, it has moments of being funny but just doesn’t quiet get there. Also there is a big huge plot hole, well I think there is, with Lord Shen apparently killing all of the pandas due to a prophecy about Shen being defeated by something of ‘white and black’. This is fine and handled very well since this is a pretty dark subject, but Shen is very publicly thrown out of the kingdom after his actions are discovered yet it doesn’t click with anyone that there is one, very famous, panda still alive in Po.
Shen is a great character, with a great design and is voiced perfectly by Gary Oldman, even if at times it sounds more like Michael Sheen. Shen manages to bring some humour to the film but still seems dangerous at the same time which is hard to do in a film like this. One missed opportunity with Shen is they could of upped the threat level from him as he is supposed to be a big, evil dictator yet when he is in power no one seems to care, he doesn’t do anything bad to his subjects.
Where the film lacks in humour it excels with the action and the different forms of animation incorporated with some beautiful 2D segmented (in 3D though) and traditional hand drawn work for the flashback scenes.
Overall the film has some entertaining moments but the lack of solid laughs made the film an unworthy successor of the original. But this doesn’t seem to bother Dreamworks as the film as a sting at the end to set up the third as it’s expected (and probably will) make the company a gazillion bucks.
KUNG FU PANDA 2 is out Friday 10th 2011.
