Kung Fu Panda 4

The fourth time is truly the charm in this long-running franchise.

Slick and briskly paced, the film incorporates its origins while conjuring enough laughs and fun to effectively deliver for parents and their cubs.

Black and Awkwafina and Hoffman do their jobs, but the jokes have a way of arriving like jokes, and sounding like jokes, but not quite being jokes. This is an action movie foremost, which is fine.

The balance between humour and heart that defined the carefully calibrated earlier films is slightly off.

Like its villain, Kung Fu Panda 4 can do an imitation, but we can tell it’s not the genuine article.

It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best.

Instead of finding the perfect balance of humor as the other films did, jokes outweigh and occasionally undercut the few resounding sentiments on personal evolution.

Lots of people are giving this movie a hard time. But that doesn’t track with the movie I saw. I didn’t just like it, but loved it. I think people might be missing the true point of this movie. I see a story building in what came before, and opening the door to something we never could have expected.

Po becomes a real hero after the last movie. Now its time for him to replace Shifu as leader of the Valley and pick a new dragon warrior to train. But its too hard, Po just wants to Kung Fu. Meanwhile, a new villain sent a theif to steal artifacts from the temple. Po captures the theif and learns about who is responsible. Po and his new companion travel to the interesting and lively Juniper City to confront the the villain behind these thefts. The city scenes are great, it's the best location in the entire series. The new villain is kind of lackluster overall. Not as colorful as say the Ox warrior. The movie is still a decent entry in the series. Its worth watching if you want to see more Po.

Not as good as ANY of the other movies, but wasn't terrible. I would only recommend to someone who LOVES Kung Fu Panda.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

dreamworks tries to get back to the top with this saga, but it only ends up sinking kung fu panda with them