Today it is Shrek 3 on the chopping block. I watched it this weekend and to sum up: while the animation is top-notch, the jokes are getting long in the tooth. It’s time for Shrek and Fiona to take a long break from the movie business while they re-center on what made them funny to begin with.
Gone are the pop culture references that we loved from the first two. There were virtually no throwbacks to other movies, or even the clever scene with the Starbucks in Shrek 2. Although there were some rather ingenious plot devices in the movie, none seemed to deliver fully.
I read that Shrek 3 was mostly written by committee and I believe it. A joke in one scene is inconsistently carried into the next, and when they have a great opportunity to exploit, they just drop the ball.
That’s not to say that Shrek 3 was all bad. The teaming up of the fairy tale princesses into a unified kick-butt team was kinda fun, though I could have done without Cinderella’s ugly stepsister. I never found that character very funny to begin with. Okay, it’s a guy in drag. That’s not overdone or anything.
Puss had a few funny scenes, but overall the talents of Antonio Banderas and his swashbuckling cat were under-used. Eddie Murphy was consistently funny given the circumstances, but you can only do so much with an ailing script.
All in all, Shrek 3 was a disappointment. It now lies with Johnny Depp and his band of mischievous pirates to save the trilogy of trilogies this summer. With Spider-man being lukewarm and Shrek bordering on bad, I don’t see how Pirates can go wrong.
Verdict: C-
[...] So far he’s covered Spiderman 3 and Shrek the Third. You can look out for his take on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End early next week. [...]