The Unseen Movie Review

Shrek 2

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The fear with sequels is always that they won’t live up to the original.

The first Shrek was a wonderful breath of family film fresh air. Expertly animated and jam-packed with a combination of subtle Hollywood in-jokes and puerile fart gags, both kids and adults could at last genuinely enjoy the same film after years of “family” simply meaning “dull for the grown-ups” when it came to the movies. Even Toy Story, Disney’s hugely successful and groundbreaking computer animated movie that beat Shrek to the theatres by six years, paled in comparison.

Taking the Disney mould as its muse, the first Shrek mercilessly smashed cinematic cartoon clichés in a fantastic, fantastical Disneyworld fairytale satire. At the time, the combination of superb voice talent, apparently infinite visual and verbal film references, and the fact that Eddie Murphey’s Donkey finally demonstrated that the king of 80s film comedy had not lost his ability to invoke hilarity, helped ensure a monster hit for the then newly-formed Dreamworks studio.

Picking up shortly after where the first film left off, the second film sees Shrek (Mike Myers) and Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) return from their honeymoon and hook up with Donkey, who has been rather ineffectively house-sitting for the happy green couple. The shock of the state of their shack is as nothing to the surprise of a summons from Fiona’s parents, the King and Queen of Far, Far Away (John Cleese and the perfectly-cast Julie Andrews). Understandably annoyed that their once beautiful daughter is now a dumpy green ogre, and especially that she has got married without their consent to an even more hideous example of a humanoid sub-species, the King and Queen have the added embarrassment that their daughter was betrothed to the handsome Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), and that his mother, the Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) refuses to let the promised union go. Shrek must die to help save face all round.

So can Shrek 2 cut the magical mustard? If anything it exceeds hopes and expectations, vastly improving on the first film which, though hilarious and innovative at the time, lost much on repeat viewings. Here it is with the arrival of the assassin hired to do away with Shrek that the film really demonstrates its superiority to the original. Antonio Banderas as the Zorro-inspired swashbuckling Puss in Boots swaggers in and steals the film right from under the misshapen noses of the series’ original stars. Puss is a truly wonderful character, and allows Banderas to prove he really can do comedy alongside his trademark Hispanic smouldering.

This time references are even thicker and faster, ranging from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Fawlty Towers, taking in a whole slew of other films and TV shows stretching back more than seventy years, fairystories stretching back centuries, and even a little bit of contemporary Hollywood studio politics. With a host of fresh characters and tonnes more quirky subtleties, the second Shrek does the reverse of Cameron Diaz’s Princess Fiona in the first film, and turns an ugly green beast into a beautifully-crafted sure-fire smash hit. If, with the hints at another sequel in the post-credits sequence, this formula can be maintained, Dreamworks are on to a long-running winner.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM