Kung Fu Panda 4 just dropped last Friday and it really managed to surprise me… With how disappointing it was, that is. I saw the trailer and the bar for my expectations was already so low that it was practically scraping Satan’s door, and yet the writers managed to limbo underneath it with ease.

Now, the rest of the filmmaking process seemed to go smoothly: the voice acting, music, animation, and special effects were all great. It was a beautiful movie, but painting dog crap doesn’t stop it from being dog crap; great production can’t cover up a bad movie.

The basic plot for the movie is that Po needs to defeat a shapeshifting Sorceress called “The Chameleon,” while at the same time finding a successor to be the next ‘Dragon Warrior’ as he takes on greater leadership in the Valley. Which… isn’t a bad idea. It opens up avenues to explore the next phase of Po’s life and how he’ll have to grow to reach it.

But the movie was just so painfully mediocre that it really does not fit as a mainline installment in a franchise so widely loved. A story’s main mode of creating satisfaction is through setting up big moments, themes, or ideas that culminate in a big payoff, and this film fails to do that every turn.

Throughout the movie, it keeps trying to pay off big moments or certain ideas without having actually set them up properly; as a result, moments that you felt were supposed to be big end up falling really flat. This issue is pervasive throughout every part of the movie, from its themes, to its fights, and even to the villain. (The worst thing “The Chameleon” did was kick someone down a flight of stairs. In comparison, Tai Lung took out an entire prison tailor-made to hold him. Shen committed Panda Genocide.). This lack of setup taints every part of the story from the continuity, the character relationships, to the plot. So many things just happen because the plot demands that it does.

Another issue with the movie is the constant undercutting of itself with an excess of unnecessary comedy. Now, the Kung Fu Panda series is no stranger to comedy but they knew when to be funny—actually funny—and when to get serious. In contrast, the fourth installment doesn’t know how to allow itself to be serious for more than three seconds and ends up drowning the audience in a sea of mediocre jokes. This overflow not only drowns out the story, but also the few actually funny bits in the movie.

These kinds of weaknesses tend to be symptoms of a deeper issue; laziness in the writer’s room and writing down to children. C.S. Lewis, author of Narnia, once said that “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest,” and I wholeheartedly agree. In the process of writing down to a young audience, Dreamworks oversimplifies the relationships between characters and the emotions that they’re feeling which weakens the story in a big way. 

The previous movies in the franchise—especially the first two—never did this. They allowed the characters to feel deeply and be troubled in very real ways and this deeply enriched the stories, for children and adults alike.

This movie fails to live up to its predecessors in nearly every single way. But it really shouldn’t have had to. The release of Kung Fu Panda 4 follows a depressing trend of studios’ releasing half-baked sequels of popular stories because they’re less risky than trying something new. However, trying something new also comes without all the baggage of a previous story; a clean slate.

When you make a sequel, living up to the previous movie’s quality in writing and production is the bare minimum and the promise that a studio implicitly makes. And when you fail to take that promise seriously, you end up with disappointments like Kung Fu Panda 4. Had that movie come out with different characters, in a different franchise, it still would’ve been crappy but it wouldn’t have been nearly as disappointing.

By instead choosing to create lazy sequels, Dreamworks is making creative-level decisions with a business-focused mindset, and this only leads to bleak places for storytelling.