Film review: Kung Fu Panda 2

Directed by: Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Starring: Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Gary Oldman, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, Jean-Claude Van Damme

On at: Cinema City Cotroceni, Cinema City Cotroceni – Sala VIP, Cinema City Sun Plaza, CinemaPro, Hollywood Multiplex, Movieplex Cinema, Patria, Samsung Imax Cotroceni, The Light Cinema

by Debbie Stowe

Hiiii-yah! Take everybody’s favorite cuddly, endangered animal. Hoo-wah! Assemble an A-list cast of voices including Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman. Deploy said A-list cast to the Cannes festival, replete with their photogenic Hollywood star boyfriends and families, where the case. Wait for world’s media to descend. Woo-cha! Add a quirky martial arts twist. Ah-ho! And get hit cartoon factory Dreamworks to package it all together.

You can then pretty much sit back and wait for the hundreds of millions of panda pennies to roll in, as with that mix, it would be difficult for the Kung Fu Panda franchise to go wrong. And with its predecessor taking over half a billion dollars, KFP2 (yep, it’s got its own acronym) was pretty much dead-cert celluloid gold.

Happily, it’s also a lovely film. The Chinese setting has allowed the cinematographers and designers to draw on a myriad of Asian clichés – mist wafting over valleys, seas of gently sloping red tiled roofs, lantern-bedecked courtyards, beads of dew dropping off elegant trees, you know the thing – to render a stereotyped China of extraordinary beauty, mystery and elegance.

Throw in 3D and the visuals are so striking that they seem almost out of place in what is ostensibly a children’s computer-animated action comedy. Into this context come fight scenes so precisely choreographed that they make The Matrix look a bit thrown together and sloppy.

All of which makes the contrast with our hero, the eponymous martial artist mammal, the more incongruous. He might be doing his stuff to the serene backdrop of undulating hills and tiered towers, but Po (Jack Black) is a typical US teenage boy, a bit of a slacker, charmingly cheeky, awkward with girls, trying to navigate the tricky transition to adulthood and using phrases like “severely cool”. He’s a likeable character, with some great lines – “Ah, my old enemy… stairs” could have come straight from the mouth of Homer Simpson. Indeed, the smart one-liners are one of the film’s most memorable aspects, which is even more impressive considering how amazing it looks.

The plot, well, you can probably guess the plot. Peace-loving existence of Po and good guys threatened by theatrically evil bad guy, who seeks world domination and to kill pesky Po and chums in the process. Our antagonist is the peacock Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), who embarked upon a brutal panda massacre after learning from a fortune teller that his goal of said world domination would be thwarted by a black and white nemesis. (A lucky escape for the zebras and the penguins then! Although there are probably not too many of them living in China.)

In the meantime our plucky panda must come of age and learn an important moral lesson, which in this case, children, is inner peace. Which can apparently be achieved by whacking a lot of bad guys. But that’s just being picky.

There’s also an unashamedly sentimental subplot about Po’s birth parents (he was a foundling raised by a goose – one of the film’s sweetest characters), which paves the way for another sequel. Naturally, the narrative holds few surprises, but it is all done with aplomb, and tugs on the heartstrings so effectively that adult viewers will be surreptitiously wiping away the odd tear, Toy Story 3 style.

Whatever your misgivings over film franchises and the Hollywood juggernaut, Kung Fu Panda 2’s charming characters and slickly beguiling aesthetics will terminate them with the merciless karate chop of a cute endangered mammal.

editorial@business-review.ro

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