Shrek the turd
Shrek the Third dares to ask: What if the series continued the gag-heavy structure of Shrek 2, but without a single funny joke?
That’s a bit harsh. There’s at least a couple of laughs, the biggest coming from terrific dream sequence in which Shrek (Mike Myers) imagines himself a woebegone father, and it escalates to some genuinely surreal conclusions: a nursery that keeps multiplying until the frame is a churning green sea of ogre infants. It’s the one passage here with some actual structure and shape, and it’s built around more than a fairy tale or pop culture reference. It’s also completely anomalous. Nothing else here is even remotely as imaginative.
The plot is a flimsy extension of the second Shrek, which I already don’t like. King Harold (John Cleese) finally croaks, and the succession plan appears to be that Shrek takes the crown unless he can produce a suitable replacement. That sends him off after “Artie” Arthur (Justin Timberlake), Fiona’s teenage cousin and the last viable name on the list. Meanwhile Fiona (Cameron Diaz) is pregnant, and Shrek is staring down fatherhood like a man being fitted for a noose. The whole affair is a drag, both in tone and in pace, easily the worst of the series.
Scene by scene this is maybe twenty or thirty percent worse than Shrek 2. But relentless jokiness becomes flop sweat if the laughs don’t land, and Shrek the Third hits that breakpoint, easily. The movie crosses from charming to annoying when we’re still in the first reel, the horribly misconceived and unfunny death scene of Harold initiating a tailspin that it never recovers from.
Start with the fact that nobody bothered to build a villain. Prince Charming (Rupert Everett) is back, and he worked fine in Shrek 2 as a preening fail-son propped up against his dynamic mother; standing on his own he’s a haircut with a grievance. These movies are generally as fun as their villains, and Shrek the Third suffers accordingly. The appropriate (and admittedly amusing) circumstance of Charming’s decline is that he’s been reduced to dinner theater: fake, put-upon drama. This leads to the climactic confrontation being staged as an actual play, with Captain Hook (Ian McShane) fronting a pit band sawing away at a knockoff of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme.
One short act of the story lands us in Worcestershire Academy, the medieval high school where we find Artie. I’d believe somebody had a standalone teen-Arthuriana script in a drawer and got told to make room for an ogre in it, because the movie can’t really figure out how to fit Shrek, Donkey, and Puss in Boots into it. If you know me, it’s probably not a surprise that this is my favorite stretch of the film, though: I especially enjoyed the girls speaking in florid faux-Middle English like a Chaucer Valley Girl. But we’re at the school for about fifteen minutes. Shrek 2 spent its entire runtime in Far Far Away and let the Hollywood satire actually develop. Here the parody gets no oxygen, and neither does Artie, who is a flat and uninteresting contribution to the Shrek stable of characters. (No surprise he’s ignored in subsequent Shrek shorts and films.)
As dull as the film, is, I don’t hate the core emotional idea: Shrek doesn’t know how an ogre becomes a dad, so he practices on a kid who needs one. It’s also not even half-baked as a concept. Shrek 1 put in a good-faith effort deconstructing Shrek’s self-loathing, and Shrek 2 put a new lens on Shrek proving his worth to his in-laws, and to Fiona. even as it erred on the side of big gags and set pieces.
It’s just disposable plastic cinema: Chris Miller and Raman Hui, both promoted from the DreamWorks story development team, are the directors, and exhibit no mastery of tone or balance. The voice cast features lots of wasted star power: John Krasinski turns up as a jock Lancelot, Eric Idle plays a Merlin who exists solely to swap Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) into each other’s bodies for a scene, a gag very obviously designed to be included in TV trailers. The material back in Far Far Away with Fiona and the princesses is so bland and forgettable it may as well not even exist, though we do get Julie Andrews’s queen character headbutting through a stone wall, which is kind of funny.
There’s a long gag about Shrek and Fiona stuffed into fussy royal clothes, hobbling around unable to move or sit or do anything they’d like to do. It’s the whole movie in miniature: unfunny, stiff, shambling awkwardly through a costume that doesn’t fit. DreamWorks seemed to agree, changing animation studios and completely reinventing the series tone in time for Part 4.
Is It Good?
Not Good (2/8)
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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.