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The Shrek franchise’s latest release, Shrek Forever After, is the fourth and supposedly last film. Its production history is chequered; while the first is considered excellent and the second almost on par, the third registered a huge disappointment (even after reading the detailed synopsis, my recollection was poor). So has Shrek Forever After returned Shrek to form?
Our story begins with Shrek living the family life in his swamp, and we witness a seemingly perfect day. That is, until we see the same day relived identically over and over again, and we realise Shrek is growing tired of routine – he misses being free and perceived as dangerous. So he signs a contract with the devious Rumpelstiltskin to have such a life once again for just one day. (I can just picture the number of married men who will have gone to the cinema with their kids and imagined signing a similar contract to be single again for a day...)
However, Shrek is tricked into never having been born in the first place, and we’re thrust into an alternate universe where Donkey is a slave to King Rumpelstiltskin, Fiona is a Xena-like figure running an underground ogre resistance army and Puss is... well, fat. To make things worse, Shrek only has one day to bring things back to normal before he ceases to exist.
Conceptually, the film probably took the right step; it tried to portray the somewhat stale characters in a fresh light. But the confusion surrounding the exchange of one mythical day for another in Shrek’s past (his birthday)... it definitely took a while to make sense in my head. I can’t imagine what it was like for the poor 5 year old in the row behind me.
I can understand the creative motivations behind this universe – trying to recapture the original charm by having Fiona, Donkey and Puss meet Shrek for the first time – but it may have been more rewarding to focus the story on Shrek’s family, or even Donkey and his dragon-donkey babies. The little ogres never go beyond being pure novelty and only one has a line of dialogue. Wouldn’t it have been more exciting to see them a little older, maybe even struggling with ogre puberty?
Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t lie in the plot alone. The storytelling magic just wasn’t quite there; those feel-good rumblings that return you to your childhood, the ones symptomatic of seeing a well-crafted animated film, are noticeably absent. You’re never really rooting for Shrek and Fiona to fall back in love, and the laughs come few and far between, most of them from physical humour related to Puss’s fatness and the milking of a small croaky kid repeating the line “do the roar” (referring to Shrek’s ogre bellow).
Shrek Forever After passes for a pleasant 90 minutes but I think that, like its predecessor, I’m likely to forget its content soon. And while it does have its moments, the fact that the three minute Toy Story 3 trailer packed more anticipation from the audience than the main feature is never a good sign.
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