Kung Fu Panda 4

The Weight of the Next Step

There is a nice little sting in the setup of *Kung Fu Panda 4*. Po, after three movies of tumbling, brawling, and accidentally becoming legendary, is told that the Dragon Warrior chapter is supposed to end. Time to stop fighting and start guiding. Watching him sag at the news, I had the odd feeling the film was quietly describing itself. How long can a franchise keep throwing the same punch before it has to admit it should grow into something else?



Mike Mitchell takes over after a long eight-year gap, and you can feel DreamWorks trying to restart a very dependable engine. The movie is still lovely to look at. The colors are rich, the textures warm, and every so often the animation slips into those bold silhouette compositions that remind you this series has real affection for martial-arts cinema. Under the dumpling jokes, the bodies still move with purpose. But there is also a brisk, almost industrial neatness to the storytelling, the kind of efficiency that usually shows up when a studio knows exactly which buttons worked last time.



I'm not convinced the movie earns all the feeling it reaches for. Po's new companion, Zhen, is a thieving corsac fox voiced by Awkwafina, and their chemistry is agreeable enough without ever digging very deep. It does not have the soulful push-and-pull Po shared with Shifu in the original film. M.N. Miller at *InSession Film* was blunt but not wrong when calling it a "pure retread" that is "repackaging ideas, themes, and jokes." The mentor-student road trip is one of animation's oldest hand-me-downs, and you can feel the seams this time.



Then Viola Davis opens her mouth as The Chameleon and suddenly the movie wakes up. Davis turns this tiny, power-hungry lizard into a real threat through sheer vocal heft. After years of watching her carry enormous grief in *Fences* or hard steel in *The Woman King*, hearing that same formidable voice wrapped around a cartoon villain is a delight. She gives the character a weight the design alone doesn't quite supply. One low threat from her and the whole movie sharpens. In the end, *Kung Fu Panda 4* is basically a comfortable, fairly harmless return visit. Maybe it did not need to exist. Still, there are worse ways to spend ninety minutes than hanging around the Valley of Peace again.