Sadly no better than the first one

Rating: 3/10 (2 January 2012)

See, when you start to get older, you forget some things, like sometimes what you thought of a movie. Not a major crime, but it can lead to little mistakes, like renting this film. For some reason (Angelina Jolie's voice acting? Encroaching senility?) I recalled, incorrectly, liking the first KFP. I got my hands on this, queued it up, and then read my review of the first one (maybe I should have performed those tasks in a different order). When I recalled how kind of flat I thought the first one was, I thought, well, maybe this one will be better.
It's not. It's not a terrible film, but it's flat and lazy like the first one. Here big fat Po (Jack Black, the titular panda), now a member of the legendary Dragon Warriors, has two dilemmas; he and the other Dragons must take back a remote city from the new bad guy, a crane (really? a zillion animals in Chinese folklore and the bad guy is a bird?) and also has to find out his true heritage, as it's really blanking obvious his father cannot biologically be a duck. The two plots progress slowly, and of course are tied together, and naturally we have to stop every dozen minutes or so to let the cartoon characters duke it out.
The design work is fine, and executed very sharply – it's a pretty pseudo-Chinese pastoral world, and we have the requisite gorgeous scenery paired with the evil, red-lit infernal machine factory of the crane (in a plot that felt wholly stolen from Detective Dee). KFP character design tends more toward the cartoony – and for some reason flashbacks are done in traditional animation, to help separate them from the CGI stuff – and that doesn't change here (I liked the addition of the rhino, even though he does nothing but stand around).
The problem here is, once again, a lazy script full of fat/eating jokes and some uninspired voice work. How is it that Jolie could make a fish seem sexy in Shark Tale, and yet fails to do anything but a straight reading with the most eroticized of animals, a big cat? Maybe that's direction, but it seems like she's sort of phoning it in, as does everyone, excepting of course James Hong, who once again is amusing as Po's duck daddy.
I'm sure the kids enjoyed this film (it did depressingly well at the box office), but unlike, say, Despicable Me or almost any of the Pixar films, there is nothing here for anyone over the age of ten. I tend to prefer family films that work on at least two levels, so the poor parents aren't bored stiff for eighty-five minutes, but the only other consideration other than cranking out a requisite sequel for this film seems to be to sell more action figures. Much like the first one, you could give this uninspired flick a pass and not miss much. My only subtextual giggle was seeing all the flashbacks with the panda village, which reminded me of the next expansion for Warcraft. But I doubt many of you would make that connection.