No ogre is a failure who has friends
After years of watered-down snarky comedies and diminishing returns, a major reinvention occurred at DreamWorks circa 2008-11. Probably not coincidentally, this was just as DreamWorks invested heavily in improving its CGI tech, including a big partnership with Intel on 3D rendering. Between Shrek Forever After, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and the Puss in Boots spinoff that arrived a year later, the studio began stepping up its game with more mythic and emotional adventures. (A half decade later, this would evolve into the era I’ve labeled DreamWorks’ “Fuck It We Ball” age in which the likes of Trolls, Boss Baby, and Captain Underpants took repellant ideas and transmuted them into deranged bliss.) Despite the strong box office returns of Shrek the Third, the critical reputation of both the Shrek series and DreamWorks’ output as a whole had cratered. Not many movie lovers were clamoring for a fourth Shrek. Nor were they clamoring for a Puss in Boots vehicle, for that matter. And yet Shrek the Fourth and Puss in Boots both work and, for my money, top both Shrek part 2 and part 3.
For the fourth outing, the crumbling franchise took a hard pivot in tone, ditching the gag-vehicle structure of the previous two outings for something much more interested in characters and storytelling and even metatextual self-reckoning. The story brings It’s a Wonderful Life to Far Far Away, imagining a scenario where the Shrek (Mike Myers) had never been born. The ogre, once a loner but now a celebrity, has been ground down by domestic life — the triplets, the public recognition, the birthday-party kid trailing him around demanding that he “do the roar” — and in a fit of self-pity he signs a contract with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn, a future DreamWorks director) for one day of being a real ogre again. That’s what he wants, stripped down: a day off. It’s a relatively sympathetic ask, and it’s the first time since the original that a Shrek movie has built its conflict out of something an adult could really recognize. It is also a look at the franchise itself, so burdened down with side characters and spinoff shorts and TV shows and merchandising that it’s forgotten the dichotomy of crass parody and wounded heart from the first film upon which all this built. What if we could shed all that baggage and just tell a story?
The fine print of Rumpelstiltskin’s Faustian bargain is that he takes a day from Shrek’s past in exchange, meaning that everything that happened that day is undone and forgotten. The day Rumpel chooses is the day Shrek was born. Thus, Shrek’s one day of peace and quiet is in fact one day of oblivion: Everything he ever did in any of the three movies is reversed, and nobody recognizes him.
What follows is part Back to the Future II dystopia and part Robin Hood woodland adventure amidst the unborn, Bedford Falls, “Mary, don’t you know me?” shenanigans: Rumpel holds court in a witch nightclub as this alternate dimension’s royalty, neglected Fiona (Cameron Diaz) commands an ogre resistance from a mountain hideout; Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) lazes about, fat and pampered; Donkey (Eddie Murphy) toils as a lonely beast of burden with no idea who this smelly ogre is. It makes a potent thematic echo of the first movie where Shrek must revisit the “happily ever after” he only reluctantly accepted in the first place. What makes this story more-or-less work is that the film really makes Shrek earn every piece of it back so we get a version of that “richest man in town” euphoria when he finally does. The Donkey friendship gets rebuilt from zero, complete with Shrek humiliating himself in song to prove he’s not a threat. Even the love story has to be fought for, not bumbled into: Fiona, eighteen years in a tower and never rescued, has no particular reason to find this guy charming. Is there really a reason these two fall in love, or was it pure chance?
Shrek Forever After is quite a bit less jokey than the two entries that precede it, and yet occasionally still as funny. The fact that it still has some solid laughs is a major win. But it does run out of both narrative and comic fuel: The story starts to lose the thread somewhat in the back half, spinning wheels once the alternate timeline starts building its own subplots that don’t always click. And these story beats have mixed success in deepening the characters: Puss, in particular, is clearly tacked on.
Mike Mitchell directs, and this is the first entry in the series made outside of PDI, DreamWorks’ Redwood City surrogate, and instead at their core Glendale campus. You can see the difference immediately. The animation is much improved from earlier outings — real weight in the ogre bodies, actual texture in the fur and cloth, backgrounds that hold up when the camera moves through them (though there’s something uncanny about the ogres’ eyes this time around; they’re overly detailed and slightly glowing). The set pieces designed for 3D make great use of space and kinetic energy, as opposed to the static dullness of Shrek the Third.
Still: Shrek 4 is a solid, surprisingly serious adventure and a major step up in nearly every meaningful metric of quality. It got lumped in with the third film by reputation, which is an injustice, because this is a movie that actually reckons with what the Shrek monster, literal and figurative, had become. The posters sold it as The Final Chapter. That held for more than 15 years, but Dohrn is currently directing Shrek 5.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.