Tonight, I went to see Shrek the Third. While I never put the first two movies in the series on a high pedestal or anything, I found them both fairly entertaining. In other words, I don't think I had great expectations of this third installment.
But the movie manage to fall well short of them anyway. I really don't know what more to say other than simply this: it's boring, and it's not funny. Alright, so there are a few laughs in there, but I think a 90 minute movie's gotta manage a better average than one chuckle every half hour.
Yes, this is a kids' movie, but this one feels a lot more juvenile than the first two. The clever fish-out-of-water plotting of the first two movies is jettisoned in favor of putting the bodily function jokes that only peppered the first two front and center here.
So many characters have now been built up over the series that the movie can't hold them all. Fiona, once a major character, is now relegated to a go-nowhere side plot. Shrek himself is barely even the protagonist this time around; he shares the spotlight with the new and rather uninteresting character of Arthur.
Even the animation is rather shoddy, compared to what other CG studios are producing these days. Sure, the models get better with each installment, but the performances the animators give them ring false this time -- sometimes too fast, sometimes too stiff, but almost always very artificial.
I give the movie a D. There are an awful lot of "third movie in the series" scheduled for this summer, and unfortunately, in these first few weeks of the blockbuster movie season, we are not off to a good start.
2 comments:
It appears the first Shrek is the only one whose idea-to-execution ratio is close to 1:1.
Yep, I agree. A laugh here and there, but nothing to write home about.
My girls enjoyed it a lot, but I could tell they weren't as thrilled as they'd been with the first two movies.
FKL
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