About as bad as any of the Shrek movies

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2012)

A spin-off of the Shrek series starring Antonio Banderas' character, Puss in Boots. Puss in Boots was the best character in any of those movies (thank the Lord we didn't get a Donkey movie!), but that's damning with faint praise. This film isn't noticeably better than any of the Shreks. The writers of these films couldn't come up with a decent joke if their lives depended on it. All they've got up their sleeves is having the heroic, swashbuckling Puss act like a real cat every once in a while. Really, that's about as clever as it ever gets. They even brought in Salma Hayek as the love interest. The least they could do was reference Desperado. It'd be a cheap gag, but the film is so dry I'd have taken it. They also have Zach Galafianakis as Humpty Dumpty, Puss's former partner with whom he teams back up. And, again, they have nothing for him to do. Why hire a well-known comedian to play this character? Literally anyone could have voiced him (you can't even recognize Galafianakis), but instead they threw away a bunch of cash. Burning it would have at least kept them warm for a few seconds. The animation is as ugly as it ever was in the Shrek movies. The human characters, in particular, have always been beyond hideous. Humpty Dumpty also looks terrible. The action sequences, however, aren't too bad. They've improved that aspect of the animation quite a bit since the last Shrek movie I saw.