Kung Fu Panda 4

 The original Kung Fu Panda easily outranks almost everything else in the Dreamworks catalog - it's not just better, it's on another magnitude. Let's call it Pixar-tier (also included: Aardman's Wallace and Gromit picture and Chicken Run, plus How to Train your Dragon).

 It was a pitch-perfect distillation of Chinese martial arts movies for a younger, western audience, with excellent action choreographed by Jackie Chan, a carefully thought-out aesthetic, brilliant character designs, and a near perfect hit-to-miss ratio on its jokes.

 And then they pissed away its potential. While How to Train Your Dragon at least attempted to tell a (however flawed) story over its two sequels, Kung Fu Panda got the less interesting new disconnected adventures approach, all made by talented folks who didn't really have a vision for the series and, despite sharing the same writer throughout, all felt more like your standard kiddie action/adventure than an attempt to make a martial arts movie. The third one at least hit upon some really nice imagery with its incursions into the spirit world.

 The hook for this one is not very exciting. It seems that after three movies, Po (Jack Black) is officially too old to hold the title of Dragon Warrior; his master, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) insists he must take on an apprentice and step down to become the valley's spiritual leader, much in the same way as Master Oogway did in the first film.

 Po is unwilling to let go, of course. So when he hears of a mysterious evil shapeshifter causing trouble in distant Juniper city, he enlists Zhen (Awkwafina), a fox thief who claims to know about the shapeshifter, and goes off to save the day as a way to evade responsibility.

 Zhen is... fine. Your typical plucky, streetwise ragamuffin whose cynicism may or may not be dispelled by Po's earnestness; It's a thin character, but Awkwafina does a good job of injecting it some of her personality. The furious five are all away doing other stuff, so instead of them there's a tedious subplot where both of Po's fathers - adopted (James Hong) and biological (Bryan Cranston) decide to follow their son because they're worried about him.

 The broad shape of the story is fairly predictable (no prize for guessing who Po is going to select as his successor), but as formulaic and kid-friendly as it is, it's reasonably well put together. The villain is at least fun to look at, and Viola Davis lends her with silky menace, but she doesn't really get a lot to do and her arc is honestly a bit underwhelming.

 So much for the plot. Visually, the film is all right; There are some really neat bits of scenery and some funny character designs (the geese in these movies always manage to crack me up).

 The script (by series stalwarts Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, plus Darren Lemke) struggles on the moment to moment. There are some inspired ideas (a precariously balanced mountain inn is a keeper) but a lot of the gags feel very forced. There's a running joke about how the denizens of Juniper City's underworld misunderstand and twist Po's words to suit them that is pretty funny in concept but doesn't work in practice, and the movie elects to double down on it, as if bringing it front and center is going to make it funny. A trio of violence-obsessed moppets (a joke that was put to much better use in the Mario Bros movie, of all places) also feels like a conceit that's a few polish passes away from finished, as if just the concept was enough. And what about that urban chase sequence's set to a (pretty shitty) traditional instrumentation of Crazy Train, does that count as one for the adults in the audience? Quite a few of the jokes fall flat like that. Meanwhile, the emotional beats are pretty trite.

 But it's the action I think that's the biggest disappointment here. The original had some seriously imaginative fights that incorporated a lot of Jackie Chan's trademark prop use and comic timing. Hell, just de-anthropomorphising the Kung Fu animal styles was a conceit so clever it could have carried the film on its own. Part two had some scope, part three had the craziness of the spirit world. This one... honestly, it's got nothing. There are a few fights, but nothing exciting, no character. Just some business that needs to be taken care off before the characters can get to the next plot point.

 I'm probably coming off as too negative here - inevitable, when over-analyzing something that was only ever intended to pass the time. It's OK. Kids will like it, and I didn't hate it: it looks good, if unmemorable, the characters are pleasant, it's got at least a couple decent jokes, and it didn't try my patience. About what you'd expect out of the third sequel to a fluke by a studio that's unfortunately very good at producing very safe, unimaginative entertainment.