Review: "Kung Fu Panda 3"

I was not a fan of “Kung Fu Panda 2.” It seemed like an indulgent sequel made for the sake of having a sequel (not to mention critic-proof box office $$$). I enjoyed being able to brag that I’d never walked out of a movie or fallen asleep during one; after “Panda 2,” I could no longer assert the latter.

So I’m happy to report “Kung Fu Panda 3” is a return to joyous form. Perhaps because it’s been nearly five years since the last one, the filmmakers took a little time to figure out what they wanted to do on a third go-round. Here Po (Jack Black), the tubby bear who became the unlikely choice to hold the mantle of the mighty and beneficent Dragon Warrior, gets to rediscover his roots and find his true inner panda.

If you’ll recall (I didn’t), at the end of “2” we see an older panda in a remote mountain village having a transcendent moment: “My son is alive!” Now the old man turns up in Po’s village looking for him, voiced agreeably by Bryan Cranston. Of course, because these movies are comedies first, the two don’t recognize each other -- despite being the only pandas around.

Needless to say, the reunion gets happier from there. Though not for Po’s goose adoptive dad (emotively voiced by James Hong), who feels threatened by a competing paternal figure. Especially when Po decamps to the hidden panda village to learn the secret of controlling his ch’i.

That’s the Chinese word for the energy source for all living things, which according to legend the pandas used to heal the sick and wounded -- in between downing mountains of food. (Think “The Force,” but with dumplings.)

They need a master of ch’i because there’s a new baddie on the horizon: Kai, a power-mad bull who was banished to the spirit realm 500 years ago by Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), the turtle kung fu master who first anointed Po. Snortingly voiced by J.K. Simmons, Kai has found a way back to the mortal world by stealing the ch’i of Oogway and the other masters.

Other familiar characters return, notably the Ferocious Five (now simply called The Five): stern Tigress (Angelina Jolie), wisecracking Mantis (Seth Rogen), as well as Viper (Lucy Liu), Monkey (Jackie Chan) and Crane (David Cross), whose personalities sort of get pushed to the sides. Wise-but-crotchety Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) and his pupils try to make a stand against Kai, but like the others get their spirit absorbed by him and turned into jade zombies, which Po quickly dubs “jombies.”

Directed by Jennifer Yuh and Alessandro Carloni from a screenplay by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger – who have been script men for all three films -- “Kung Fu Panda 3” has the same nice mix of martial arts action, humor and tugging emotions as the first movie.

For instance, one of the running jokes is that Kai announces himself wherever he goes as this infamous world-conquering destroyer, but nobody’s ever heard of him. And, of course, there are plenty of bits about Po’s fellow pandas being self-indulgent feasters and slackers -- they prefer rolling down hills to walking.

When Po sees even the little pandas putting away the grub he quips, “I’ve always felt like I wasn’t eating up to my full potential.”

This is one of those animated flicks intended for kids but with enough cleverness and little flourishes to keep the adults fully engaged, too.

Review: "Kung Fu Panda 2'

I think I may have actually nodded off during "Kung Fu Panda 2." This is surprising, because I have never fallen asleep in a movie theater before. Also, because it happened not during the talkie scenes but in the middle of the martial arts action.

It may amount to no more than 10 seconds I missed, but I still feel compelled to report it. I've sat near famous critics who snored halfway through a screening, and it troubled me when that didn't show up in their review. It may be largely subjective, but movie criticism is still journalism, so it's our duty to report the whole of our experience of a film.

To wit: "Panda 2" literally put me to sleep -- albeit very briefly.

I'm not an ingrained panda-hater; I very much enjoyed the first film from 2008. The mix of excellently-detailed CG animation and goofy kid-friendly humor made for a jolly good time that appealed to adults as well as tykes.

But the sequel is just going through the motions. The comedy is again built around the slacker sweetness of Po, an animated version of Jack Black as a tubby panda. It worked last time around because he was a nobody poser who dreamt of fighting alongside the Ferocious Five: Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross).

But as we learned at the end of the last film, Po completed his unlikely journey to become the Dragon Warrior, the culmination of kung fu mastery. His pratfalls and clumsy antics don't jibe now that he's the baddest bear in the land.

Although I must say that for the beast who's supposed to be the best of the best, both Tigress and their teacher Shifu still seem to have his number.

Speaking of Shifu, voiced by Dustin Hoffman, he's kind of kicked to the curb in the sequel, showing up for a few scenes near the beginning and end. He speaks cryptically about a new threat that could "destroy kung fu," which is like saying you're going to destroy gardening. Even if you kill all the best gardeners, there's still going to be plenty of people around who know a thing or two -- same with chop-socky.

The new villain is Lord Shen, a peacock who dreams of conquering all of China. He's well on his way to doing it, too, thanks to a new invention: the cannon. (For a brief time, the movie had a subtitle, "The Kaboom of Doom," that seems to have evaporated.)

Gary Oldman does a good job making Shen a somewhat sympathetic figure with some parental abandonment issues. He's also a lot more menacing than you might imagine a brightly-hued peacock could be -- for those cascading feathers hide a small arsenal of knives.

Screenwriters/producers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who also wrote the original film, make the unwise choice of giving Po some backstory to explore. Po has a goose for a father, and one thing I liked about the first movie was that no one seemed to question this ornithological oddity.

But now Po is sent to chase after the memory of his missing parents, and it gives the sequel a downbeat fibe that sucks the life out of the lighter material.

Rookie director Jennifer Yuh's fight scenes don't have the crisp clarity of the last movie -- the action is either flying by too fast, or they dial up the slo-mo so far it's like we're stuck in molasses.

But mostly "Kung Fu Panda 2" just lacks the novelty of the original, which found a sweet spot in between martial arts and goofy animated critters, and milked it for every last laugh. This one feels like leftovers that have curdled.

1.5 stars out of two

Reeling Backward: "Little Big Man"

There are a lot of things to love about 1970's "Little Big Man."

It's one of the first great Revisionist Westerns, when Hollywood began to throw a baleful eye at the portrayal of American Indians in the movies it had made up until then. Long before "Dances With Wolves," it depicted a white man who lives among both Indians and U.S. soldiers, and finds the latter lacking.

The film wears the clown face of a comedy, but has many moments of pathos and even some of disturbing tragedy. It eases seamlessly in and out of these disparate moods without ever seeming discombobulated. There's a gentle world-weariness, with a sense of outrage buried beneath the satire. It's the sort of Western Charlie Chaplin might have made if he'd been born 50 years later.

The makeup turning Dustin Hoffman into a believable 121-year-old man still looks amazing 40 years later -- compare it with the combination of makeup and computer assistance for "Benjamin Button," and I think it holds its own quite well. Artist Dick Smith was not nominated for an Academy Award only because they didn't have that category back then.

Based on the novel by Thomas Berger, the screenplay for "Little Big Man" was written by Calder Willingham (whose first movie script, "The Strange One," was featured in this space not too long ago.) And, of course, it was directed by Arthur Penn, whose heyday as a filmmaker ("Bonnie and Clyde") was rather short but intense -- "Little Big Man" more or less marked the end of it.

Hoffman plays the titular character, a man who saw every face of the Old West. He was an Indian fighter, a member of the Cheyenne tribe, a mule skinner, snake oil salesman, drunk, gunfighter, merchant and hermit. Structurally, there's a lot of similarity to "Forrest Gump," with the main character a naive bumbler who stumbles across all sorts of famous people, and acts as our guide through the history we thought we knew.

The framing story is set in the 1950s, with the extremely aged Jack Crabb relating his story to a skeptical historian. Crabb claims to be the sole surviving white man from the Battle of Little Big Horn.

General George Armstrong Custer, played by Richard Mulligan, is depicted as a cartoonish figure, more inept than evil. Crabb and Custer repeatedly run into each other, with Custer's attitude to the little man growing darker each time. It builds to their final confrontation right before the massacre, with Crabb goading the vainglorious Custer into a foolish charge -- revenge for the general's earlier massacre of Crabb's Cheyenne family.

(I should note that in the film Custer is always referred to as a general, although at the time of his death at age 36 he was actually a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Cavalry. He did receive a temporary battlefield promotion to major general during the Civil War.)

Another historical figure Crabb meets in his journeys is Wild Bill Hickok, played by Western mainstay actor Jeff Corey. Crabb is at this time a wannabe gunfighter calling himself the Soda Pop Kid. After watching Hickok gun down an assassin, and coolly commenting at the bloody mess that he hit both the heart and lungs with one shot, the Soda Pop Kid decides to go into the mercantile business.

Martin Balsam plays Merriweather, a con man who keeps getting whittled down by life -- quite literally, losing an eye here, a hand there. Faye Dunaway plays the young wife of a reverend who briefly adopts the teen Crabb after he's recovered from the Indians who raised him after his settler parents were killed. Her mix of lustiness and protestations of religious fervor make for a memorable turn.

Crabb's longest and most important relationship is with his adopted grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, played by Chief Dan George, who received the lone Oscar nomination for "Little Big Man." It's a terrific role, with wisdom, humor and heart, and George makes the most of it.

"Little Big Man" unfortunately has not maintained much of a reputation over the decades, which is a pity. I consider it one of the minor Western masterpieces.

4 stars