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Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Wise Rating 75%
Review Date: 2017

A panda martial arts master must reach beyond what he feels capable in order to defeat a seemingly unstoppable foe from the spirit realm. DreamWorks specializes in making animated movies that are F & F: Fun and Forgettable. The best of them, like “Kung Fu Panda 3,” can be loads of fun and a great experience, but try to remember the details of this movie by the time the next iteration of this franchise comes out. I can’t for the life of me remember the first two installments, except that they were loads of fun and a great experience. This one seems to be the best of the three, due to its even grander epic spectacle and exquisite state of the art animation, but it’s hard to compare because I can barely remember the other two. Can you? Anyway, “Kung Fu Panda” represents DreamWorks’ finest animation franchise—it’s other hit franchise, the “Madagascar” movies, could be funnier but could also get a little crude and off-color. The features of the “Kung Fu Panda” films are always excellent art styling, amazing martial arts and engaging, family-friendly stories, and those features are in abundance with this installment. But that’s about it. That’s much more than most movies, for sure. I’m willing to spend my hard-earned dollars to rent this movie, and did, which is saying a lot, but I wouldn’t spend money and effort to see it in the theater (unless I had kids). I need that “something more,” something that Pixar’s “Inside Out” had, a movie which I did pay to see in the theater. The panda’s master said in this movie, “If you only do what you can, you will never be more than you are now.” He could have told that to DreamWorks Animation as well.