While How To Train Your Dragon serves as a lot of people’s
evidence that Dreamworks is far better than we give them credit for, the Kung Fu
Panda films are also an example of the studio at their best. Admittedly, the
entire franchise started on a rather ill-fitting note by casting Jack Black as
the main character, and sure his mannerisms were quite grating to start out
with, but it had a sense of excitement and fun that a lot of other recent
family films were lacking. The animation was high-energy and very well-crafted,
leading to probably some of the best fight scenes of any film series of the last several years, the acting was top-notch
with an all-star cast that contained some real martial arts legends like Jackie
Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Oh, and the writing took the standard “be
yourself” theme of a lot of family-friendly fare and executed it so well that
it managed to break the mould of its kind and surpass the genre clichés. You
can imagine, with a pedigree like this, that this third film would have some
rather high expectations. For reasons I will get into with the review proper, I
was really not looking forward to this. But hey, after the weaksauce family
offerings of the last long while, I’m still positive that this will be a decent
watch. How decent is the question,
though.
