Comments have been asked for, and comments ye shall get. I was lucky enough to catch Shrek ahead of its UK opening thanks to my friends at the local theater where I am running my Film Festival this week. He got the print in from Paramount with Raiders, which we are showing, and he wanted to run it before the first public screening, so I sat in on Thursday night.
Hmmm...
Afraid I didn't like it. It wasn't badly made, but nothing happened!
Mike Myers wasn't Shrek for the first half...he was doing an impression of Shrek. The story, which promised Shrek getting to grips with being King and having to deal with babies, didn't do that at all. He was off on the same kind of road movie journey as the first film and, baby nightmare aside, they didn't come into it until five minutes at the end.
The babies themselves freaked me out. I already thought this, but seeing them move I couldn't get this image out of my head:
http://www.olgabaclanova.com/picture_ga ... eaks_6.jpg
Check out the kid in the middle hugging the man and the two sitting next to him on the steps, from Tod Bowning's Freaks...was this an in-joke of some kind, or just a sick-joke?
Donkey and Puss swapping voices/bodies...why?
Eric Idle getting upset at a gag that was NOTHING like the Monty Python joke, which itself only borrows from years and years of radio plays where coconuts were used to convey galloping hooves. Lame, Eric...I hope he loses any court action and has cut off his DreamWorks ties...the guy is majorly up his own behind.
The villains were awful...no reason for Charming to get them all together...would have been MUCH better if Shrek had really had to deal with being a king and they'd drafted in Charming to give him lessons in manners, only for him to sabotage the efforts.
There was no story. Period.
Bright spot: Gingerbread Man's life flashing before his eyes - genius. Some of the one liners. But not much and nowhere near the repeatability of Shrek 2.
The Princesses going hard core at the end? Where were the jokes? Where was the danger of Fiona being pregnant and having to protect the baby? Why didn't Lilian head butt them out of the jail immediately? Where did THAT come from?
Shrek turning up at the end and, um, making a speech for the film's climax? Drab. This film had no spirit.
I liked Timberlake...he wasn't bad, and the college sequence was pretty fun, bu there wasn't anything special in the whole film. I'd like to see it again on DVD to see if it works for a second time, but I didn't "enjoy it".
Some of the animation was, frankly, not on par, especially the horse cycles, which were SO GOOD in the second one. Characters were stiff here and anyone getting up to go into a move were not keyframed correctly and they just bounded into action without much thought.
They say they always had four...no five...films planned. Baloney! This one wasn't dreamed up as part of an overall series...you can plainly see that from the lackluster story and flat situations. This seems to be a filler before going on to Shrek 4 and having the kids.
It was bland and, dare I say, <I>boring</I>, DWs' worst film yet. Andrew Adamson was missed, and the original concept of Shrek taking on the Arthurian legend was wasted...it wasn't about that at all. And it wasn't about what the promos have been going on about.
In the end, it wasn't about anything.
) But MORE Shrek after that....I have my doubts. 
