Three years ago Dreamworks Animation decided to assert itself for the first time since Shrek in 2001 as a fantastic animation studio with the release of Kung Fu Panda. It honestly came out of nowhere. There was no expectations surrounding the film, at least no more than any other run of the mill animated film with talking pandas and made for children. Then it was released and it became the film that you had to see, it surprised and you just couldn’t stop smiling while getting some kick-ass action.

So the question that Dreamworks needed to answer was if it could replicate that experience for the audience that it has finally won over. Unfortunately it failed to recreate the surprise by merely recreating the same film that we saw three years ago, except now in 3D.

The characters are just as brilliantly designed and fight sequences wonderfully put together as it was in the first film. With the addition of Master Ox (Dennis Haysbert) and Master Croc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) to the cast of good guys and Shen (Gary Oldman) on the wrong side of the fence of good and evil you know that there’s a lot of new characters and fighting styles shown in the film for it to not feel completely stale as we watch the already established characters move the plot along.

The film’s plot deals with a lot of characters dealing with their origins and their own family issues. In the furious five, Tigress (Angelina Jolie) has always been the strongest willed of the group who you can tell has a lot of heartache in her life but at the same time is what propelled her to be the great master she is now. Why she isn’t the lead of the franchise is that audiences always look for that likeable quality that she doesn’t have, which is what Po (Jack Black) has. Po is confronted with the job of taking on Shen, a master of explosives who invented fireworks. The film manages to weave Shen into Po’s own back-story that the film really wants to pay more attention to. However, the story really sits shotgun in this adventure action comedy and while it doesn’t beg for too many brain cells at the same time it doesn’t feel poorly put together or executed, just less interesting than the actual action set pieces.

I still have to ask the animators and writers if they’ve ever seen an actual peacock fly, or even glide for that matter if any of you smart readers want to pick at this comment.

Rating: 7.0/10