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"Shrek Forever After" starring Mike Myers |
That’s a question that Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) has also been asking himself. He’s going through a midlife crisis. Bored with changing his kids’ nappies, unclogging the outhouse and leading a same-old, same-old domestic life, he keeps dreaming about the good old days when he was a proper, roaring-and-stomping ogre who inspired fear.
One afternoon, at his children’s birthday party, he snaps. He smashes their cake and storms into the woods.
It’s at this moment that nasty, needy Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) strikes. He offers Shrek the chance to be a real ogre again in exchange for a day of his life. It’s a deal!
It’s also a disaster - because the day he chooses is the day he was born and Shrek is transported back into a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar to him.
It’s lorded over by Rumpelstiltskin, where Donkey (Eddie Murphy) works for a coven of witches, and in which Fiona (Cameron Diaz) struggles to raise a band of rebel ogres. Shrek’s duties are clear: he must find Fiona, kiss her, and by doing so undo the terrible spell.
A film that imagines what the world would be like if a good person had never existed? That sounds like It’s a Wonderful Life, doesn’t it? Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke have packed their screenplay with so many allusions - the flying witches, for instance, are straight out of The Wizard of Oz - that it sounds like everything except itself. The Carpenters’s Top of the World is used (unsuccessfully) for comic effect.
Donkey (dismayingly) sings songs by Madonna and Whitney Houston.
This is said to be the final Shrek film in the series, and while it will no doubt be a hit - busy parents will use it as a pacifier, a largely benign way of occupying their children while they do a bit of shopping - it feels as exhausted as its ogre star.
Some cute details - Rumpelstiltskin’s fondness for cupcakes, Puss In Boots shown as a fat moggy unable to get into his breeches - don’t make up for the tedious farting gags, uninspired banter and slack action sequences.
