When the series restages key moments from the first film and then tries to surprise us, it's both a welcome alternative to repetition and an obvious thing to do. It's quite a logical idea for Puss in Boots to have let himself get fat, but equally it feels like a desperate ploy in the absence of more meaningful characterisation. The result of this is that all the funniest jokes in Shrek Forever After come with an unusual sense of sadness. To use a musical analogy, it's a bit like listening to The Who play 'My Generation' today: you're impressed that the band can still belt it out, but it's also rather tragic to hear a 70-something sing "I hope I die before I get old." But drawing attention to these features is a double-edged sword, because it also highlights how tame and ungamely the series and character has turned out to be. Scenes like this are clearly intended to poke fun at the series, showing that it can laugh at the commercial behemoth that it has become. The film could have gone further with this, using Shrek to send up the vapidity of our celebrity-obsessed culture, but in the end it settles for the outburst at the birthday party and leaves it at that. We might roll our eyes at how domesticity is so easily demonised, but few of us would wish to live our entire lives out as the "loveable lug" circus attraction that he has become. One of the things the film does to justify this device is showing how depressing Shrek's life has become to warrant his wish with Rumplestiltskin. For adults who have grown up with the series or remember Capra's film, it's more of a pleasant rip-off, lacking the overt sentimentality which for many renders Capra unwatchable. To children who are coming to the series for the first time, this will seem like a novel and compelling idea. All the integral elements of the Shrek canon - his love for Fiona, his friendship with Donkey, the taming of Dragon and so on - are restaged without him, creating a sense of unsettling familiarity. To this end, all the elements of his life which Shrek has taken for granted are played out with a sense of detachment. Jimmy Stewart's suicidal tendencies have been commuted to angry, empty frustration, but the fact remains that Shrek is now effectively George Bailey. It has the same basic plot of Frank Capra's film, with a protagonist who despairs of what his life has become and who firmly believes that the world would be better off without him in it. The relative success of this film is either a stroke of good fortune or a testament to the fact that film is a collaborate medium.Īs far as its plot is concerned, Shrek Forever After is essentially an attempt to recapture the spirit of the first film via the narrative of It's A Wonderful Life. But his directorial output has been largely awful, from the schmaltzy Surviving Christmas to the painfully unfunny Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Mike Mitchell did work as an animator on the second Shrek, as well as working as a story artist on the passable Monsters vs. While not everything about it is as remotely satisfying or as funny as the series was as its peak, it is also better than we had any right to expect, and is all things considered a decent way to say goodbye.Ĭertainly, the film is better than you might expect given the background of its director. It is both a partial return to form and an admission on the part of Dreamworks that they really screwed up with Shrek the Third. Shrek Forever After (originally titled Shrek Goes Fourth) is a somewhat successful attempt to achieve the same effect with the Shrek series. While it sounds like a cynical tactic, it can occasionally be very successful, as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ably demonstrates. Many of these last-ditch efforts try to recapture the spirit of the original, both to remind fans of how good the franchise once was and to put memories of the bad apple out of sight and mind. When the quality of a film series has noticably declined, those responsible for the series often attempt to rectify things with a last-ditch sequel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |