SHREK FOREVER AFTER directed by Mike Mitchell, written by Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke, with the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas and Julie Andrews. A Paramount release. 93 minutes. Opens Friday (May 21). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN
I wasn’t really looking forward to Shrek Forever After.[rssbreak]
The digital debacle of 2007’s Shrek The Third – a joyless, pointless attempt to extend the hugely profitable franchise after the perfect ending of 2004’s Shrek 2 – had soured me on the series. That and the increasingly creepy “realism” of the CG animation, which put Shrek into the Uncanny Valley for the third feature.
I’m happy to say that Shrek Forever After is pretty decent. It’s nowhere near as good as Shrek 2, but it does eradicate the bad taste of Shrek The Third by tilting the series in a slightly more mature direction.
This darker and more textured adventure finds the grumpy green ogre – voiced as always by Mike Myers – once again having second thoughts about his wonderful life as a husband and father. When the scheming Rumplestiltskin (Walt Dohrn) offers him the chance to be the gleeful terrorizer of villagers he once was, cranky Shrek jumps at it – but ends up in an alternate universe where he’d never existed, his beloved Fiona (Cameron Diaz) is still cursed, and Puss-in-Boots is really, really fat.
Director Mike Mitchell uses the alternate reality conceit to subtly retool the series’s visual and tonal schemes. The movie is steeped in shadows and darkness, but it looks terrific, even through 3-D glasses that further reduce the brightness of the projected image.
Better still, this adventure trades the previous instalment’s wall-to-wall fart gags and pop culture references for jokes rooted in our knowledge of the characters, and puts Shrek and Fiona’s surprisingly tender love story back at the forefront of the narrative, where it belongs. People tend to overlook Diaz’s vocal work as Shrek’s beloved, but it’s just as essential to the series as Myers’s slippery Scottish accent.
On the downside, Rumplestiltskin is a pretty feeble villain, and a subplot about an ogre rebellion goes nowhere, though it does let us see what Mad Men’s Jon Hamm would look like as a green CGI version of himself.
But those are minor concerns. Shrek Forever After is about Shrek and Fiona, and if this really is the last time we’ll see these characters, this movie gives them the ending they deserve.
normw@nowtoronto.com
