MovieChat Forums > Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) Discussion > A few things that I thought were badly w...

A few things that I thought were badly written

posted 9 years ago by JurijFedorov
3 replies | jump to latest

Tigress finds the super secret village super fast. Did she have a map? We never know. We should have been shown how she found the village. And not a single panda wonders about how she found it, even though they were clearly extremely secretive about it.

The evil dude finds the village super fast, we do see him follow the tracks of Tigress some of the way and her smell it seems. So if she didn't go there he would not have found it so fast? And Po would have had more time to train and be with his family? When he finds the village the whole coolness of the village disappears. At the start we all thought it was something spectacular but then we find out it is actually pretty easy to find apparently.

His bird father, Mr. Ping, found out that his real father lied to him before Po told him anything about it. Po just met him coming from the bridge where he found out the pandas didn't know chi. How did Mr. Ping then know about it right away? He was not on the bridge with Po and Po's father, and we discover how he knew about it.

Po knew that they had all helped him while he was in the realm world... somehow. Again, he might have sensed it, but we are told nothing about it. He could have said: "I sensed that you all helped me while I was there!" Just a short sentence that would take a few seconds to say. And it's not like the movie could not use a few slow moments and dialogue explaining things.

There are a lot of these things in the movie but I just mentioned some of them. Seems like there is a longer version of the movie out there. At least I imagine the script was longer. It seems like they replaced some of the crucial dialogue with action or just removed it.

It all seems like going a bit too fast as Po both meets his father and discovers it is him right at the start. They could have continued the joke for a bit and let us know something he didn't know. We also see the main villain right away. He is there from the very start which takes all the mystery away. The first Kung Fu Panda has a ton of mystery, that's what makes it good. This one looks very plain. He suddenly knows chi because he needs to win. And the village learn to fight very fast. Everything happens so fast that it is more a ride than a good deep story.

[–] friedenstone-54-207765 9 years ago

Or how about the fact that the panda village was able to reach kungfu master level within a extremely short span of time...Or the fact that everyone learned how to use their chi in a matter of seconds. The whole script is lazy but it is just a children's movie after all.

[–] nekogillespie 8 years ago

Kai wasn't following Tigress' tracks he was following Po and his father's tracks

[–] FullColor 8 years ago

A few things I thought were badly written;

- Kai saw the pandas using chi, decided he wanted it for himself, and then...just kind of knew how to take it. No build up or explanation as to how he figured out how to have such a huge amount of control over something he just found out about.

- All of the crud about Po not knowing who he is. They start with "What does being the Dragon Warrior mean?" and then make the switch to "I don't know who I am in entirety" and it really doesn't transition smoothly. I especially was tilting my head at "I don't even know if I'm a panda". He was getting along with them and fitting in perfectly but then he questions if he is one? Why?

- Speaking of which...the whole teacher thing. Shifu decides to just dump it on the guy in the most inconvenient way possible so that he's pretty much guaranteed to fail which enables the self pity fest and subsequent "But I can't teach!" worry because the guy didn't manage to instantaneously be a great teacher despite no forewarning he'd even be one. I was thinking through that scene "It was his first day. Of course he sucked".

- Li says it's super important for the village to remain secret, but no reason is given why and no one seems to care when other people show up. No one questions Ping (aside from a kid who wants to know what he is, not why he's there), no one questions Tigress, no one panics and asks how he found them when Kai is revealed to be coming, the fact that literally every kung fu master in the world knows its location apparently doesn't matter at all.

- The whole jade transforming process lasts like two seconds for everyone else but takes forever for Po so he has time to stop it.

- The Wuxi Fingerhold. For one thing, it doesn't work on spirits, because reasons never explained or foreshadowed. I feel like they needed some indication of this before hand so it felt less like they were pulling things from nowhere for the sake of making the movie longer. It'd probably seem fine without foreshadowing if the logic was more apparent, the kind of thing people could maybe guess before hand, but it really doens't seem to be.

For another thing, using the Wuxi Fingerhold on someone takes not only them but whatever they're near to the spirit realm. So, basically, the exact same magic that doesn't work on Kai DOES work on Kai? That was a pretty big and illogical gamble on Po's part. Why not write it so the move works, but Kai is so strong now that he's managing to claw his way back (metaphorically) to the physical realm, so Po goes in to fight him there?

I'll admit I wasn't paying as much attention as I could've been, so maybe I got details here wrong and they actually were better done than I thought, but from what I remember they were badly handled.