Shrek The Third

Shrek the Third picks up where the previous installment in the franchise left off and offers up more or less the same sort of fun, silly smatterings of juvenile humor and sharper, adult oriented wit. This is probably the most uninventive and unoriginal in the series, but the humor and vaguely positive messages of hope that made us all love the original film are still mimicked well enough here to make this a mostly satisfying sequel. The concept of the ogre Shrek as an untraditional, fairytale hero was a fresh and funny skewering of the world’s most timeless fables back when the franchise launched, but it’s now an understood, tolerated idea whose potency has waned. The third film touches on a lot of the same themes, picking up feminism and pacifism as new positive suggestions for kids, but mostly sticking with the “be yourself” mantra that’s become the signature of the series.

In this new film Shrek (Mike Myers) is trying to dodge his claim to the royal throne of Far Far Away by tracking down the only living heir, Arthur, (Justin Timberlake) who turns out to be nothing more than a high school abuse case bullied ceaselessly by the likes of jousting champion Lancelot (John Krasinski). On top of this, Shrek’s ogre bride Fiona (Cameron Diaz) has just announced that she’s pregnant and the eternally thwarted Prince Charming (Rupert Everett) has hatched a new scheme to become king by rallying together all the other fairytale villains that never got their “happily ever after” ending.

It’s a perfectly good-hearted, clever sequel but it lacks some of the larger than life punch of its predecessors. So many of the gags are callbacks to material from earlier films that you start to realize that however entertaining this might be, it is still largely a retread. All of the likable Shrek crew returns, though, and it’s still far funnier and more creative than the average animated movie nowadays (i.e. it doesn’t involve penguins or any sort of animal that has escaped from the zoo and now needs to learn how to survive in the human world). It’s mostly just more of the same, but sometimes that’s enough.

Grade: B-