Jonathan's Movie Review - Shrek Forever And After

Shrek Forever After can best be described metaphorically as the last, tiny bit of toothpaste that gets extracted from a tightly rolled up tube of toothpaste. Face it; the tube is basically empty! Go out and buy a new tube of toothpaste! In other words, if you don’t have a good idea for another Shrek film, don’t make another damn Shrek film! Think of an idea for a completely different movie, and run with that! I guarantee any film producer that all they would have to do is slap their logo a couple times through the preview of their new film, and the result would be (if their previous films were any good) that people would pay just as much money as they did before to see their new work, and they would get a much better reputation.

I know every time I review a kid’s film Pixar is brought up, but I’m going to say it again, they are the last kid’s film company that goes for quality over quantity. What they do portrays my theory perfectly. They make one film a year, a fresh idea almost every time, and they have in turn more money and a better reputation than Dreamworks or Disney. Even with that example these other companies seem to be fine with having a lot of money (though not as much as Pixar which is seen through their superior animation), and get bad review after bad review, which seems to be okay for companies like Disney. It’s true; they can still make a lot of money producing garbage. Any company that jumps on that bandwagon pisses me off. Rarely does any movie go for a break-through and gets experimental. Instead we get the same exact overused plot points every single freakin’ time.

This “final” Shrek film doesn’t go anywhere new. The story is yet another loosely put together plot that has no structure at all. In fact, I can really only tell you the basic set up. The rest is just a bunch of poorly done, shot for 3D action scenes, and a bunch of fart and burp jokes. Shrek is going through some sort of a mid life crisis, and gets really pissed at everything around him including his three babies (which creeped me out because that would strongly suggest that him and Fiona had ogre sex), so he signs a contract with the new antagonist Rumpelstiltskin that things will go back to normal for 24 hours. Somehow, in the fine print it says that Rumpelstiltskin will rule the kingdom of Far Far Away. So confusingly this contract will last forever unless Shrek kisses his Ogre wife Fiona because the contract also has an escape clause. Wait, what? The contract is supposedly only supposed to last for 24 hours. So why all of a sudden does it change to forever? And why would Rumpelstiltskin write a contract with an escape clause that would ruin his evil plans? Because the plot needed both things to happen. Another reason could be that whoever’s dumbass wrote this took all of 5 minutes or less to create an outline, and filled the rest in in 10 minutes or less.

The main problem with this film is that it didn’t feel like a fun quest like the first two Shrek films. It felt like the third movie, a bunch of random, unrelated things happening all at once. They don’t rely on funny dialogue or situations; it’s just a sequence of, like I said, action and stupid jokes.

As a foot note there where a lot of “WTF moments”. Several parts throughout the movie it shows the donkey-dragon babies that the Donkey and the dragon somehow produced, which raises scientific, social, and ethnical questions I wish not to get into. Also, the gingerbread-man character gets eaten by the cat and dies.

That’s about as much as I want to discuss this thing. It was bad, but not the worst Dreamworks has come up with in the past. And it wasn’t a film that made me mad in a way that Transformers 2 or Twilight did, where I enjoy bashing them. It was bad in a way that depressed me. This is another example of money and resources that could have been used for bigger and better ways. It could have been used to make a brilliant piece of cinematography, or, not to make the people who made this feel like assholes, but the money that this film burnt could have fed little dying kids in Africa.