Kung Fu Panda

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

It's really hard to fault Kung Fu Panda, because it knows exactly what it's doing and it does it well. I can just imagine the glee from development executives when someone came up with the title - everything you need to know is right there, and as an added bonus, you can throw the "Everybody was Kung Fu fighting..." song into the trailer. Perfect!

Jack Black is the major comedic force here, bringing his gleeful "everything is awesome!" delivery to the central role, a talking panda named Po who works in a noodle shop but dreams of training for kung fu with his idols, the Furious Five - Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper and Crane. Their master is Shifu, who looks like a raccoon, and his master is Oogway, a turtle. The bad guy, Tai Lung, is a leopard, and even Po's father is not a panda at all but a stork. Everybody lives in an ancient Chinese village and speaks the same language, and I would really like to figure out how they procreate.

Anyway, as you might imagine, Po soon gets his wish when, through a series of madcap circumstances, Master Oogway ends up naming Po, and not one of the Furious Five, the Dragon Warrior, a legendary fighter who's said to be the only match for the evil Tai Lung. To the chagrin of the Five, Po must then be trained by Shifu, find his inner kung fu warrior, and eventually face Tai Lung, etc.

The movie is a collision of Black's signature humor with a succession of surprisingly awesome fight scenes - undoubtedly the reason to see this. The first big set piece is Tai Lung's escape from prison, which is build only for him and rests inside a massive chasm in a mountain guarded by hundreds of rhinoceroses. How he does this is a pleasure and will only leave you questioning how he wasn't able to escape sooner - climbing the chasm by leapfrogging onto freefalling boulders is a piece of cake, but apparently picking a lock proved to be way too difficult.

Once he escapes, he has a big showdown with the Furious Five on a flimsy rope bridge that gets more mileage out of a flimsy rope bridge than perhaps any other movie; meanwhile, Po trains with Shifu under more modest, but no less choreographically impressive, circumstances; their fight over a dumpling is especially clever.

The line-up of actors is also impressive, although they could've gotten more mileage out of the Furious Five considering the voice talent - Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Lucy Liu, and Jackie Chan. Jolie, as their unofficial