½
Kung Fu Panda 3 (PG)
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Caution: spoilers.
Master Oogway is in the spirit realm, having died in the first movie. He is attacked by Kai (J.K. Simmons), a yak with whom he had been brothers in arms 500 years ago. We eventually learn why they had become enemies; it was because of Kai stealing chi from others, which led Oogway to defeat him and send him to the spirit realm. Kai has spent the last 500 years stealing chi from deceased kung fu masters, and now takes Oogway's. He then returns to the mortal realm, to defeat the Dragon Warrior, Po, whom Oogway said he had set on the path to defeat Kai. Meanwhile, Master Shifu retires from teaching and appoints Po the new teacher, something he's completely unprepared for. Then Po's biological father, Li Shan (Bryan Cranston), shows up looking for his son, and the two of them are happily reunited. However, Po's adoptive father, Mr. Ping, is concerned that he will lose Po to Li, who tells him that there's a hidden village full of pandas. Po learns from a scroll written by Oogway that Kai can only be defeated by a chi master, and Li tells Po that the pandas in his village know about chi, so he goes to train with them. Meanwhile, Shifu sends Crane and Mantis to look for Kai, but they end up having their chi stolen. Kai can release jade forms of the kung fu fighters whose chi he had stolen, now under his control. Po calls hem "jombies", short for "jade zombies". After Po leaves the Valley, Kai shows up and steals the chi of all the kung fu warriors except Tigress, who escapes to warn Po. And... I feel like I'm maybe forgetting things and getting stuff out of order, but I suppose what I've detailed is good enough.
In Li's village, Po meets lots of other pandas. One of them is Mei Mei (Kate Hudson), a ribbon dancer who seems to be a potential romantic interest for Po, but nothing ever comes of that. There are various other pandas we get to know vaguely. Po begins learning the ways of the pandas, but Li says he's not yet ready to learn about chi. When Tigress shows up, Li is forced to admit something I'd suspected all along: that he doesn't actually know anything about chi. None of the pandas do, even though their ancestors were chi masters long ago. So Po has to figure out some other way to defeat Kai and send him back to the spirit realm. And I think it's pretty neat how he does that, but I won't spoil it. (I should say I have no idea how Tigress found the hidden village. And I have no idea why Kai couldn't just return to the mortal realm after Po sends him to the spirit realm, the same way he came here at the start of the movie, but whatever.) Anyway, Po and Kai have a big fight in the spirit realm, after their big fight in the mortal realm. And Po wins, and frees all the masters whose chi had been stolen. (The ones that were still alive automatically returned to the mortal realm.) And plenty of stuff happens throughout the film that I'm leaving out.
Well, for most of the time I was watching the movie, I thought I'd rate it three smileys, but eventually some stuff happened that I liked enough to possibly rate it four smileys, but I decided to split the difference and give it three and half. And... I dunno what else to say, except that the DVD includes a short film called "Panda Paws".