Film Shapes

It's been eight years since the release of Kung Fu Panda 3 , and that film may have felt like a nice way to wrap the series, what with Po, the Dragon Warrior, finding his 'pandas' and reuniting with his old pop. But when there's cash to be made, and a new crop of teeny tots to tweens (?) to be harvested for it, then here we are, at the fourth installment. This might sound cynical, and it is, but actually, I favour this 'franchise' (ugly word, I know) over any of the other DreamWorks fare. The film starts with Po (Jack Black) opening his dads' new noodle shop, fresh from a scrap with a massive stingray. The Dragon Warrior fame sits well with him but Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) is on his case to choose a successor and head 'upstairs' to a more exalted position as spiritual leader of the valley. The news of a burgeoning threat in far-off Juniper City gives Po an excuse to avoid this duty, and so off he trots with a reluctant partner in miscreant Zhen ...

We saw this on May 22 at the 109 cinemas in HAT Kobe. The HAT apparently stands for Happy Active Town, an area east of central Kobe that was rebuilt after the Hanshin earthquake of 1995. Why am I writing all this? Probably because it's a tad more interesting than the film we saw there. I guess this Pirates movie shows that even if you throw actors the calibre of Depp, Rush, McShane and Cruz together, you still can't guarantee goals. It was a fairly flaccid affair (though a little better than numbers 2 and 3) and Depp is required to tent-pole the whole thing but he's not THAT good. It seems the franchise doesn't have the legs. Bombastic and dispiriting. P.S. A few days later I watched a 'small' German film called The Edge of Heaven and it stayed with me a lot longer than this Pirates film did.