Kung Fu Panda 2

The sequel to Dreamworks Animation's 2008 hit Kung Fu Panda, while inevitable in view of that movie's box-office success, was never going to quite duplicate the charm of the first; after all, how many times can a goofy, overweight panda become the ultimate Kung Fu warrior? Fortunately, there's still plenty of the humor, action and even the heart, that made the first one such a pleasure to watch.

The story begins with the tale of Shen (Gary Oldman) an aristocratic peacock whose with ambitions of ruling all of China using the gunpowder which his parents, rulers of Gongmen City invented as a means to entertain their citizens with fireworks for a more deadly purpose. An old soothsayer (Michelle Yeoh) warns Shen that he will one day be defeated by a warrior of black and white, as a result of which Shen goes out on a genocidal quest to rid China of all Pandas. Of course, as the viewer knows, he was not successful because Po has grown up (albeit raised by a goose) to become a Kung Fu warrior. For his misdeeds, Shen's parents banish him from their city, as a result of which he spends a lifetime planning his revenge, and his takeover of all of China.

Po (Jack Black) is happy being the Dragon Warrior, and all is well in the Valley of Peace in which he lives, until Shen's goons (who are a pack of wolves) invade it in search the metal needed in Shen's foundries to manufacture his cannons. As Po and his friends, the Furious Five, fight off the wolves, Po finds himself confronting the leader (Danny McBride) and faltering when he sees his tattoo, which triggers a flashback of a time that Po can barely remember; the day his biological mother left him. The wolves escape, and Po is left searching for answers, which he can only find after he confronts Shen himself. Of course, this task doesn't prove easy as Shen takes over Gongmen city using his newly-forged firepower, taking down the Kung Fu Masters Thundering Rhino (Victor Garber), Storming Ox (Dennis Haysbert) and Croc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) charged with the stewardship of the city following the death of Shen's parents.

As Po and the Furious Five embark on a quest to stop Shen from taking over China, Po is troubled by his visions and tries to use techniques mentioned by Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to gain inner peace. However, the road to inner peace will be a rough one for Po as he and his friends find themselves head-to-head with Shen's army of wolves and fearsome arsenal of cannons, which could mean the end of kung fu.

While not on the same level as its predecessor, this film is buoyed by two things: its fantastic animation and its humor, which had me in stitches most of the way through. Sure, it suffers from the "bigger is better" syndrome with which most sequels are saddled, some of the jokes, like Po's seemingly eternal clumsiness and inability to climb stairs, are recycled, and the scriptwriters even find a way to shoehorn in explosions that were absent from the first film, but for the most part the filmmakers have managed to make a movie that is entirely consistent in tone and, for the most part, quality, with its predecessor. It's definitely more than just another direct-to-video candidate. The flashback sequences, rendered in the same faux-handrawn style in which the opening dream sequence of the first Panda film was done, is juxtaposed nicely with the full-on CGI action and provides a very effective transitional device between past and present. The opening of this film, detailing the origin of Shen, has its own stylized rendering which, while not necessarily slick, adds a nice bit of cultural texture to the narrative, especially since it seems based on Chinese puppetry.

The heart of the film, which focuses primarily on Po's relationship with his adoptive father, the noodle-vending Goose Ping (James Hong), and while it's pretty standard-issue stuff in terms of how it eventually pays off, the actors and animators do a good job of investing the father-son relationship with some genuine emotional weight.

I guess one genuine weakness of the film is that apart from Black, Oldman and Yeoh (and to a lesser extent Angelina Jolie as the Furious Five's Tigress), the cast of mainly comic actors doesn't have a whole lot to do, which is a shame especially with some fresh comedic blood on board in the form of Danny McBride. Fortunately, though Black does a great job of supplying the laughs, aided amply by the animators.

It was also nice seeing (or hearing) Jean-Claude Van Damme in something other than a direct-to-video clunker again, especially when his character Master Croc did one of his trademark splits.

I skipped the 3-D version of this; one might say I'm suffering from 3-D fatigue at this point, especially considering that the 3-D tickets were exactly twice as much as the 2-D ones. I don't think it would have been twice the viewing enjoyment, to be honest, and recommend this to martial arts fans, animation fans, and anyone just looking for a good laugh at the movies.

4/5