Puss in Boots

What to do with a multibillion dollar franchise after it reaches the end of its story arc (hopefully at least)? Start making spin offs of course! Thus, here’s the first tale of the titular, swashbuckling cat’s (Antonio Banderas) early days, before he joined the Shrek series back when it was still fresh in 2004. Yet with the series's postmodern, tongue in cheek style done to death, can this cat possibly land on his feet?

Set in a strange mixture of fairytale and western Mexico, the picture follows our feline friend as he joins literal cat burglar Kitty Softpaw’s (Salma Hayek) and former friend turned enemy Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis), a criminal mastermind planning to steal the Golden Goose from the Giant's Castle in the Sky (think Jack and the Beanstalk). Yet to do this they must first take magic beans from vicious criminals Jack (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jill (Amy Sedaris); and this is only the beginning of the plot. The problem isn’t that it gets confusing but that the whole story is very episodic, and there is no single thread that sustains the whole piece, making it feel more like a series of interconnected events rather than one whole story, a problem that’s kept popping up in animated films recently. Yet on the other hand, Puss in Boots just about gets away with this as when watching the film it seems like less of a problem than it does later when you look back on it and struggle to work out quite how the whole thing hung together, which it does just about.

The reasons that the movie still manages to work is simply that despite its story it manages to create surprisingly good characters, though arguably they would have more of an emotional effect if the story had worked better. Our protagonist plays on Zorro and western mythology and is suitably entertaining, largely thanks to some great voice acting by Banderas, whilst his love interest feline fatale Kitty Softpaws works very well, with Hayek and Banderas reigniting the chemistry they’ve had before in the live action film Desperado. Zach Galifianakis pulls off some of the best lines while creating a suitably interesting character, particularly during his and Puss’s back-story segment. The rest of cast, including oddly enough horror and fantasy maestro Guillermo Del Toro (Comandate), manage to keep the film witty, bubbly and genuinely humorous throughout. Something which is also the script's strong-point, delivering a lot of good verbal and visual gags alongside knowing references to films like Fight Club and Godzilla, all of which although offering nothing new is still amusing. Meaning that whilst there are clear problems with the film there is enough of a distraction for you not to notice them much of the time.

Yes, the story a bit of a mess and the humour of the Shrek universe is not as fresh as it once was, but there’s still a lot of laughs and fun to be had here. Overall, despite its flaws it remains a good, entertaining piece.

See Puss In Boots at York City Screen. For more information, click here: [1]

Add Comment

You must log in to submit a comment.