Shrek enters a slippery contract with shady wizard Rumpelstiltskin, sending him on an It's a Wonderful Life-type odyssey.
Shrek Forever After
- Directed by Mike Mitchell
- Written by Josh Klausner and Darren LemkeWith the voices of Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas
- Classification: PG
Blockbuster film franchises, like people, grow old and tired. The previous entry in the Shrek series, Shrek 3, lacked animation - a bad sign for any cartoon series. The problem was the title character, an ogre who married a princess and became beloved and domesticated. Kind of like a lion in a petting zoo.
That's no life for an ogre. And give Shrek Forever After credit for correcting the series' wayward drift with an audacious bit of film thievery. The latest and last Shrek comes to life not because it finally gives in to 3-D (although it does), but because the DreamWorks creative team has transplanted the beating heart of a 1946 film classic, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, into the series' giant green carcass.
The film begins with Shrek surrounded by diapered, shrieking ogres. Princess Fiona, his wife, is suddenly full of orders. Do this. Do that. Villagers who once feared and left him alone now circle his house demanding that Shrek autograph their pitchforks. The monster's only refuge is eye-toonies - hard gin and three or four baby blues on a toothpick.
Alcohol doesn't help, however. "I used to be an ogre," Shrek complains, up to the eyeballs in eyeballs, "now I'm just a jolly green joke."
Up pops Rumpelstiltskin, a shady wizard with a slippery contract: He'll make Shrek an ogre again for a day if Shrek gives up something in return. Shrek doesn't read the fine print and - poof! - finds he never existed. And so, just as in It's a Wonderful Life, when a kindly guardian angel shows George Bailey (James Stewart) what the town of Bedford Falls would be like without good old George, we see how the Kingdom of Far Far Away fares without bad old Shrek.
Ogres are being hunted to extinction by dive-bombing witches. Princess Fiona is public enemy No. 1. Donkey is a cart-pulling mule, forced to sing show tunes at the end of a cracking whip. Puss in Boots is a pampered pet of the evil king, Rumpelstiltskin, and has become unspeakably fat - an orange sofa with claws.
Shrek's job is to win back his kingdom. But not before enjoying his slob's day in the sun - scaring the bejesus out of bothersome villagers and enjoying uninterrupted mud baths, slurping back eye-toonies whenever he wants. All of this to the bouncy old Carpenters hit Top of the World.
It's a fun moment, typical of the Shrek series, which has always found pleasure in fooling with unlikely pop-culture references. (Remember the presnack Gingerbread Man singing Culture Club's Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? in the first film?) What makes the series succeed as family entertainment is that it has made these references work for two generations. For instance, a frantic scene here in which witches put on a loop-de-loop air show - a sequence tweens will recognize as a parody of the Quidditch contests in Harry Potter movies. And parents will enjoy for the music, a club version of English Beat's throbbing 1980 hit, Click, Click.
It's also good to hear Mike Myers (as Shrek) with something to complain about again. We will miss his slow-boiling exchanges with Eddie Murphy (Donkey), a comic partnership that compares favourably to the classic, early TV pairing, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. Hell, we'll miss Murphy. Donkey is his only part in more than a decade that allows the comedian to run his mouth at full speed.
Rock critic Robert Christgau once said that you can judge box sets by the last disc in the package. In which case the inevitable Shrek box will be very good indeed. The shout line on the Shrek Forever After poster says it best: It ain't ogre till it's ogre.
Special to The Globe and Mail