Kung Fu Panda 4: with no Angelina Jolie, it’s time for this franchise to call it a day

Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman still voice Po and Shifu in the franchise’s fourth instalment – DreamWorks Animation

Martial arts stars have always had to contend with unforgiving career best-before dates: even Jackie Chan had to slow down in his 50s. And while you might have imagined the cartoon ones would be exempt from time’s ravages, Kung Fu Panda’s knee joints these days are creaking like a haunted flight of stairs.

Eight years have passed since the release of the previous instalment in DreamWorks’ animated franchise and, unfortunately, nothing in this new one suggests that anyone came up with a better reason than “these things still make money” to bring it back. Where the first two films especially were funny, sweet and punchily kinetic, the latest is sunk in the same going-through-the-motions doldrums as 2010’s Shrek Forever After. It’s an hour and a half of wringing out the last remaining drops of value from characters who’ve already worked a heavy shift.

Jack Black returns as the portly hero Po, who – ironically – is urged to find a successor by his master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), since stringing out his career as the legendary Dragon Warrior for much longer is obviously ill-advised. Anyway, this search soon segues into an uninspired A-to-B adventure in which Po and a rascally fox voiced by Awkwafina have to dethrone Viola Davis’s shapeshifting sorceress The Chameleon, who is trying to pinch a magical jade staff you almost certainly forgot was a crucial prop in Kung Fu Panda 3.

The animation itself is passably slick, with two or three nicely choreographed sequences, such as a hectic chase through a bustling harbour town, that pay nippy homage to the vintage Hong Kong action movies by which the series was originally inspired. But next to last year’s terrific Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (never mind the Japanese anime films those other recent franchise-revivers liberally borrowed from) it also feels desperately unambitious and staid. Digital animation has transformed in the last decade, and the odd diagonal zap before a fight scene can’t conceal the fact that poor old Po hasn’t kept up.

The script is just as pallid. There’s lots of hackneyed comic repartee but no real vocal chemistry between the players, a trio of cutesy prepubescent hoodlums that may feel awkwardly familiar to anyone who’s seen Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, and a laboured running joke about dodgy zen proverbs that never really lands. Most younger viewers will probably have their interest held regardless – there’s always something going on. But many older ones will recognise the hollow, empty-calories quality of so much Hollywood entertainment made with one eye on tried-and-tested intellectual property and the other on the Chinese market.

As for Jackie Chan himself, his martial arts guru Master Monkey – a supporting character in the prior three instalments – makes only a brief non-verbal cameo here. The same goes for Angelina Jolie’s Tigress, Lucy Liu’s Viper, and the rest of the Furious Five. If that means Po’s one-time idols have now essentially retired, their protégé should think about following suit.

PG cert, 94 mins. In cinemas now

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