Shrek Forever After

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 17, 2010.

It's a worrying trend, these cartoon characters who age like real people. In recent years we've seen the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles grappling with their irrelevance and the Ice Age mammoths facing the dilemmas of parenthood; now Shrek Forever After follows the smelly green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) beyond his allotted happy ending as he descends into middle-aged disillusionment.

Perhaps his plight strikes a personal chord with the screenwriters (who include Date Night's Josh Klausner) but I somehow doubt that the target audience will want to see one of their favorites carrying on like the hero of a John Updike novel. Marriage, kids, the burden of moderate celebrity – it's all too much, compared to the glory days of his youth when all he cared about was terrifying the villagers.

So Shrek wanders away from home to strike a magical bargain with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn), a pint-sized villain resembling a cross between a leprechaun, a ventriloquist's dummy and the horrible baby from Family Guy. From here on the film becomes yet another revamp of It's A Wonderful Life (1946). Shrek loses everything and can only restore the status quo by again winning the heart of his true love Fiona (Cameron Diaz) – no easy task, since he's trapped in an alternate universe where Rumpel rules the land and Fiona is a revolutionary leader who cares only for her cause.

Aside from sheer corporate greed, there's no reason for a fourth Shrek film to exist, but that evidently doesn't bother the director Mike Murphy, previously responsible for Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999). While this is meant to be the mixture as before, the gross-out humour has turned sour: poor Shrek keeps getting slapped down, and all the characters seem to dislike each other.

The 3D format comes with its usual advantages and limitations. The colours are darker and dimmer than one would expect in a regular cartoon, and the script doesn't exactly solve the problem by arranging for most of the action to take place at night. Still, I admired the animation of the parallel version of Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas) – a pampered housecat so overfed he rolls around like a furry beach ball, supplying a few moments of lightness in a depressingly earthbound movie.