Kicks, punches, pratfalls, head smacks, tumbles and free falls galore: A parade of pain dominates Kung Fu Panda, which forgoes the rigors of character development for lazy, bone-crunching mayhem. A few clever lines of dialogue give occasional respite from the cacophony and hint at genuine emotion, but the focus always returns to concussive superficiality.

The half hearted attempt at a story focuses on Po (Black), a soft headed, soft-bellied panda who dreams of being worthy enough to battle alongside the Furious Five—not Grandmaster Flash’s rap posse but a quintet of fearsome martial artists. Each hopes to be chosen as the Dragon Warrior, a legendary fighter entrusted with the ancient secrets of the much-heralded Dragon Scroll. A firecracker blunder catapults Po smack into a celebrated selection process, where he becomes the Chosen One. An accident, you say? “There are no accidents,” calmly insists ancient turtle Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), who apparently invented kung fu and doles out wisdom like fortune cookies.

The animation veers from dazzling (particularly in an opening sequence deeply indebted to Genndy Tartakovsky’s wildly superior cartoon saga, Samurai Jack) to merely mechanical, showing only sporadic visual flair but, like much of the movie, otherwise content to revel in its conventional invention.

Director: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson

Time Out rating: 2/6

Source: Time Out New York Issue 662: June 5–June 11, 2008