Continuing his "legendary adventures of awesomeness", Po must face two hugely epic, but different threats: one supernatural and the other a little closer to his home.
Po and his friends fight to stop a peacock villain from conquering China with a deadly new weapon, but first the Dragon Warrior must come to terms with his past.
The Dragon Warrior has to clash against the savage Tai Lung as China's fate hangs in the balance: However, the Dragon Warrior mantle is supposedly mistaken to be bestowed upon an obese panda who is a tyro in martial arts.
When Sid's attempt to adopt three dinosaur eggs gets him abducted by their real mother to an underground lost world, his friends attempt to rescue him.
Alex, Marty, Gloria and Melman are still fighting to get home to their beloved Big Apple. Their journey takes them through Europe where they find the perfect cover: a traveling circus, which they reinvent - Madagascar style.
Spoiled by their upbringing and unaware of what wildlife really is, four animals from the New York Central Zoo escape, unwittingly assisted by four absconding penguins, and find themselves in Madagascar.
Manny, Sid, and Diego discover that the ice age is coming to an end, and join everybody for a journey to higher ground. On the trip, they discover that Manny, in fact, is not the last of the woolly mammoths.
When Gru, the world's most super-bad turned super-dad has been recruited by a team of officials to stop lethal muscle and a host of Gru's own, He has to fight back with new gadgetry, cars, and more minion madness.
Manny, Diego, and Sid embark upon another adventure after their continent is set adrift. Using an iceberg as a ship, they encounter sea creatures and battle pirates as they explore a new world.
When Po's long-lost panda father suddenly reappears, the reunited duo travels to a secret panda paradise to meet scores of hilarious new panda characters. But when the supernatural villain Kai begins to sweep across China defeating all the kung fu masters, Po must do the impossible-learn to train a village full of his fun-loving, clumsy brethren to become the ultimate band of Kung Fu Pandas.Written by
20th Century Fox
This is the first time to have Ava Acres do a movie with Seth Rogen (who voiced Mantis). See more »
Goofs
Shifu mentions that the dragon scroll prophecy has been around for 500 years, yet Po mention's in the first film that they've been waiting 1000 years for the Dragon scroll to be revealed. And seeing how Po is the biggest Kung fu fan, he shouldn't have been wrong. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Oogway:
Inner peace... inner peace.
[a flower petal falls on his nose]
Oogway:
Itchy nose...
See more »
Crazy Credits
Instead of the usual Dreamworks SKG opening with the little boy fishing from a crescent moon in the sky, Po climbs a huge staircase, jumps onto the crescent, and fishes from there. See more »
Kung Fu Panda 3 meets the minimum requirements in what fans of the first two films would expect: jokes about weight, Po's still struggling with handling Kung Fu (even though he became the "dragon warrior" at the end of the first film) and questions of how to determine what true family is. Sadly, the film itself lazily meets these expectations without providing much else for its fan base.
We start with an uninteresting villain played by J.K. Simmons. He is an associate of Master Oogway, and that is how he is known (this joke gets really old really fast within the film itself). He manages to escape the spirit realm (this universe's equivalent of the afterlife) and is determined to take over the spirits of kung fu masters because.... well who cares? The film simply establishes he is a bad guy who wants revenge and to have control over the real world - you know, your typical one-dimensional children's movie villain.
Po's father, played by Bryan Cranston, finds him at the start of the film, which is really convenient because pandas are supposed to know about something called "chi" which is what the villain is after. Pandas were known to heal Oogway with this power in the past, and it is of course the only way to stop Simmons' character. This subplot eventually clears up what we did not know about the pandas in this universe, and of course the film goes to great lengths to make comedy out of how lazy pandas turn out to be.
The jokes used in this film are just rehashed jokes from the first two films, not providing great comedy as its predecessors since it proves to be unoriginal. Kung Fu Panda 3 is still enjoyable, but its strength lies on the theme of questionable identity posed by the two competing fathers of the film: Mr. Ping and Li. This is only touched on a few times throughout the film, but when it is touched on it brings up interesting questions about whether Po would need nature or nurture: that is, does he need his biological father or the one who raised him. These moments are the only ones of great intrigue within the film.
There is also a return to a cop-out fighting technique from the first film that makes the conflict of the story less difficult for Po to get through. While the film has the same spirit of its predecessors, Kung Fu Panda 3 is not a very fun film, but it is not terrible.
2.5/4.0
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Kung Fu Panda 3 meets the minimum requirements in what fans of the first two films would expect: jokes about weight, Po's still struggling with handling Kung Fu (even though he became the "dragon warrior" at the end of the first film) and questions of how to determine what true family is. Sadly, the film itself lazily meets these expectations without providing much else for its fan base.
We start with an uninteresting villain played by J.K. Simmons. He is an associate of Master Oogway, and that is how he is known (this joke gets really old really fast within the film itself). He manages to escape the spirit realm (this universe's equivalent of the afterlife) and is determined to take over the spirits of kung fu masters because.... well who cares? The film simply establishes he is a bad guy who wants revenge and to have control over the real world - you know, your typical one-dimensional children's movie villain.
Po's father, played by Bryan Cranston, finds him at the start of the film, which is really convenient because pandas are supposed to know about something called "chi" which is what the villain is after. Pandas were known to heal Oogway with this power in the past, and it is of course the only way to stop Simmons' character. This subplot eventually clears up what we did not know about the pandas in this universe, and of course the film goes to great lengths to make comedy out of how lazy pandas turn out to be.
The jokes used in this film are just rehashed jokes from the first two films, not providing great comedy as its predecessors since it proves to be unoriginal. Kung Fu Panda 3 is still enjoyable, but its strength lies on the theme of questionable identity posed by the two competing fathers of the film: Mr. Ping and Li. This is only touched on a few times throughout the film, but when it is touched on it brings up interesting questions about whether Po would need nature or nurture: that is, does he need his biological father or the one who raised him. These moments are the only ones of great intrigue within the film.
There is also a return to a cop-out fighting technique from the first film that makes the conflict of the story less difficult for Po to get through. While the film has the same spirit of its predecessors, Kung Fu Panda 3 is not a very fun film, but it is not terrible.
2.5/4.0