Film review: Shrek Forever After (U)

Published on Sunday 27 June 2010 11:34

Director: Mike Mitchell Running time: 93 minutes ***

DREAMWORKS' big, green box-office machine is finally drawing to a close, and about time too. Not that Shrek Forever After is an especially bad film – but as a franchise it ran out of steam some time ago. Back in 2001, the original Shrek, based on William Steig's beautifully drawn book, gave us a curmudgeonly green ogre as a hero and a movie which rejected the general Disneyfication of fairytales, but none of its sequels has managed to deliver the same freshness of the first film and its wry, revisionist wit.

Once upon a time Shrek (Mike Myers) was the ultimate antidote to the eat-up-your-greens Jolly Green Giant, minting candles from his own earwax and roaring at small animals, but gradually he's become a supporting player in his own stories, routinely outshone by everyone from Eddie Murphy's Donkey and Antonio Banderas' Puss in Boots to the Gingerbread Man (Conrad Vernon).

So in an attempt to go back to basics, the writers have pilfered from science fiction and It's A Wonderful Life and sent Shrek to an alternative reality which boots him out of married life and back to his original friendless single state.

The cause of this is new villain Rumpelstiltskin, who apparently has moved on from spinning straw into gold for the Brothers Grimm to trying the same trick with old material for DreamWorks. Rumpel (Walt Dohrn) has a long-held grudge against the ogre, and sees a chance to get even when he finds Shrek living with Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and their three kids but feeling emasculated by the grind of fame and dutiful domesticity.

In exchange for the chance for Shrek to live life again "like it used to be" for 24 hours, Shrek agrees to hand over one day from earlier in his life to Rumpelstiltskin, who chooses to take away the date of Shrek's birth.

Suddenly, Shrek is living in an alternate Far Far Away in which he was never born, Rumpel is king and Fiona is the leader of a resistance movement and looks like Xena, Warrior Ogress. Meanwhile, Donkey is now acting as a pack mule for a coven of cackling witches, Puss is a Garfield house cat with an eating disorder and no hope of fitting into anyone's boots, while the Gingerbread Man is a gladiator in an amphitheatre taking on animal crackers.

Now Shrek has one day to get a true love kiss from Fiona – who no longer knows him – or he'll vanish forever, leaving his friends trapped in their drab parallel existence. Aside from Rumpelstiltskin, the only Shrek character who seems to be enjoying their new life is the usually bland Mrs Shrek, which raises interesting questions about the state of feminist freedom in Far Far Away Land that the film can't be bothered addressing.

Instead there are dogfights between the witches and Shrek to justify the film's 3D screenings, and ogres condemned to line dance to the Pied Piper of Hamelin because someone in DreamWorks must have really enjoyed watching beasts groove to Put A Ring On It in Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeaquel. And there lies the problem: Shrek now feels like just another animated family – a genre that the series used to rail against. Four films later it's as overfamiliar and underwhelming as any other child-friendly marketing forces.

At one point our hero sees his face on an outlaw poster and quips: "Sure is great to be wanted again." Well wanted, perhaps – but no longer required. After 90 minutes you may just be glad it's all ogre and done with.

On general release from Friday

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, June 27, 2010