Shrek Tercero

Paul McCartney is a great songwriter. Let me just get that out of the way. But he isn't perfect. Take for example the song, "Live and Let Die", a song he wrote in the '70s for a Bond movie of the same name. The song is used briefly in Dreamworks' latest outing for everyone's favorite Scots ogre. In the song he actually wrote this line: "But if in this ever changing world in which we live in". "In which we live in"? Was he kidding? A great talent, but that is some lazy songwriting. I figure he was either exhausted, or under contract, as opposed to being inspired.

And that's the problem with this entire movie. The writing is simply not up to par. The story is loaded down with so many different elements that it is impossible to develop any of them. You can almost see the writers thinking, "Okay, now we've got a bunch of stuff for Shrek, Donkey, and Puss to do. Let's put in some stuff for Fiona and Lillian here..." The result is that there's a script, but no real story. And the dialog with some exceptions, is full of the clichés they so happily lampooned in earlier Shreks. The result comes across as a 3rd or 4th draft.

Andrew Adamson directed the previous two Shreks and has one of the writing credits here, but he did not direct it. I guess the franchise is so important now that it must be handled by two directors, neither of whom has Adamson's knack for timing. At various points in the evening, the pace was surprisingly ponderous.

It's not unpleasant, as movies go. It's just disappointing when such an average film continues a series of such good ones.

So, I just caught the 10 pm show of Shrek 3 and I gotta say, as a fan of the first two I was not impressed. In fact, I was very disappointed. It literally was the same movie the third time, and instead of infusing it with tons of fun and pop culture references like the second Shrek did, it just relied on its plot and genre convention to further it. There was ONE funny moment. The Led Zeppelin reference was good and was funny, but as a whole, the movie was a phoned in experience. Again, what a disappointment. At least most of the stuff shown in the trailer was in the first fifteen minutes or so and you get fresh stuff from there on out. The sad thing is that this fresh stuff feels dull and rehashed even though you've never seen it before.

Terrible effort all the way around.

Shrek The Third is another entertaining romp through the erstwhile Hollywood of Far Far Away with a few laughs for adults and a few more for kids. Like all of the films in this series, it has a big and good heart, and occasionally pays homage to or pokes fun at modern films. Unlike the previous films, however, Shrek III is not a source of non-stop hilarity, and contains a little more thematic content.

Shrek finds himself inheriting his father-in-law's crown and learns that Fiona is pregnant. Predictably, both of these eventualities play pretty dissonantly on the big green guy's insecurities, and he goes a-questing to locate the next-in-line of succession - a young, dejected, high school kid. Meanwhile, charming has developed even more of an attitude problem, and is putting together a whole battalion of people with grudges.

One of the themes of the first two Shrek films was 'don't judge a book by its cover'. Shrek III takes the theme a little farther and puts a different spin on it. The lesson learned here is "don't judge yourself superficially." And it works. My rating of six is based solely on the entertainment value of the film. This film is not quite as well-paced and well-directed as the previous two films, and Charming is simply not the heavy-weight heavy that his mom was. Nevertheless, it's still worth a look, and still carries positive messages entertainingly.

I had high expectations for this movie. When I saw Shrek 2, I was pleasantly surprised. Few sequels are as good as the original, but Shrek 2 was.

Shrek the third did not continue this trend. While there were sill plenty of funny moments, it was nowhere near as amusing or original as the first two. They could have done so much more with this movie if they had tried. At the end, I felt sort of cheated.

However, Shek the third isn't a bad movie in itself, only when compared to the others. I would still recommend going to see it. Unlike most, I liked Artie's character, even if he did talk too much (I'm not even a Justin Timberlake fan).

The movie did not really hold the attention of my two younger kids. Even for me, the funny experience of watching both Shrek 1 and 2 was not really very evident with this installment. I remember in Shrek 2, I was laughing out loud with each passing pop culture reference and innuendo being bantered around. However, that was not so here.

I was not too amused with the Disney princesses characters. Shrek's "baby nightmare scene" was well-executed. Justin Timberlake did well in voicing his "grovelling at Merlin's feet" scene. Overall, this movie was not that bad, but it needed to be much better to be worthy to stand on the same level as the first two Shrek films.