Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe Review

Jackie Chan stars in Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe, a “comedic” sequel that manages to be even worse than its questionable predecessor.

Nevertheless, as always, I tried to approach this new movie with an open mind, thinking that, maybe, just maybe, the filmmakers learned their lessons from the previous release. After all, we have a new director, new actors (apart from Jackie Chan), and a completely different premise.

Unfortunately, nothing has been done to improve what barely worked in the first film. In fact, Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe is even more painful than its predecessor.

The movie starts with Jackie Chan (playing a fictionalised version of himself) being driven to a “Panda base” in the mountains, accompanied by his friend from the first instalment, Huhu the CGI panda. Suddenly, though, he is transported (somehow) to a magical tribe in the jungle, which, I presume, exists in another dimension or something. In any case, it turns out said tribe idolises pandas, so when they manage to capture both Jackie and Huhu, our human protagonist is immediately informed of a legendary prophecy.

Said prophecy says that, once a panda finally arrives at the tribe, it will bring with it a catastrophe that must be stopped by going to the top of a mountain named “Awe Summit”. And a “messenger” must go alongside the creature, who, of course, turns out to be Jackie himself. So after a couple of hijinks (there are a number of those in the movie), Jackie and Huhu are sent to fulfil their destiny at Awe Summit. But of course, they’re also being chased by Shan (Shan Qio), a warrior member of the tribe who is sent by those who (somehow) oppose the Chief (Li Ma), and want to become the stuff of legends themselves.

The film’s premise is predictable and boring, but since the project seems aimed primarily at preschoolers, I wasn’t really expecting a complex narrative or engaging themes. What I was expecting (despite having already experienced the first movie) was a fairly entertaining story, but Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe doesn’t really have one. In fact, most of the film consists of bad physical comedy, bad fart jokes and bad attempts at sentimentality, which makes it almost impossible for any adult to enjoy it. In fact, I would even question a child’s ability to enjoy this film.

I don’t want to exaggerate, but I really found the experience of watching Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe to be a painful one. There’s a lot of mugging for the camera (which turns annoying really quickly), plenty of pratfalls (which aren’t even that well-performed) and a bit of action (which isn’t particularly well-shot), but nothing that turns the movie into something memorable or even fun. Jackie Chan is charismatic, as always, but if his character was flat and excessively earnest in the first film, then he’s even more boring in this one. Yes, he becomes friends with the tribespeople and all that, but that’s the extent of the character work done in the movie.

In that sense, Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe feels like a first draft of everything. The first draft of a screenplay that needed a lot of work; a series of first takes of scenes that could’ve been performed much better, and the first cut of a final product that has a duration of a hundred minutes, but feels a million years long. Pacing is atrocious, with the threadbare plot being brought to an abrupt halt every few minutes in order to include more farts, more falls, more funny faces and more ugly CGI. And although much like in the previous movie, Huhu is supposed to be adorable, he looks so fake that it ends up feeling like an uncanny valley approximation of a real animal (he seems to move at a different framerate than the humans, and sometimes lacks basic motion blur).

Now, Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe is supposed to be a “children’s movie”, but it doesn’t even really feel like one. It’s goofy and ridiculous, but at the same time, it includes some rough imagery, like a CGI boar getting killed by an arrow, or a bloodied and wounded Jackie Chan trying to climb up a mountain. It’s like a weird mixture of earnestness and a rather problematic view of native tribes (who, despite being “lost” and living in another dimension, speak exactly the same language as Jackie). Moreover, it’s all packaged up in a pretty ugly movie; Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe’s cinematography lacks colour and spark, looking most of the time like an amateur production shot with a cheap DSLR camera. At least a couple of animated sequences look nice, but they also made me think that the film would work much better as pure animation.

Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe could have been better. It could have been a fun and naive family movie, full of light action and cute CGI creatures. It could have proved the haters of the first movie wrong, and it could have improved on everything its predecessor did so dreadfully. Unfortunately, what director Derek Hui ends up doing is doubling down on the awfulness, bringing us something that might be less problematic than the first film, but that ends up being more boring, uglier and more frustrating. At least the ending is kinda cute (and manages to subvert one particular expectation), but it’s too little and certainly too late. I can’t think of a worse plan than watching Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe. There’s no magic to this godforsaken movie.

Panda Plan 2: The Magical Tribe is now available to watch in select US theatres.