Zip-a-dee-do....Nah.

Rating: 4/10 (3 September 2012)

I'll be frank right up front, even though that's not my name. Puss in Boots isn't a very good movie. It attempts to cling to the tattered coattails of Shrek an is just good enough to sustain interest for you and your littlest of little ones. It does have good voice acting, but the writing's kind of flat - hardly any jokes, puns, pop-cultural references, etc. - and on the whole it's just not very exciting.
This is the tale (ha! pun) of how Puss (Antonio Banderas) came to be, growing up in an orphanage where his only friend was Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galiafanakis). The two spend most of their time trying to find the whereabouts of the magic beans owned, apparently, by Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris), who here are bad people. The beans will grow a beanstalk that leads to a giant's castle, where the goose that lays the golden eggs lives. Sort of a mish-mash of fairy tales, but what the heck.
Puss and Humpty, the little scamps, become thieves in their small border town; when a heist goes wrong, Humpty is left to, er, take the fall, and a bounty is put on Puss' head. That's where the mystique develops - the hat, the boots, the sword, the attitude. Later, as Puss is about to finally get a hold of those magic beans, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) shows up for the same score. But it's totally, okay, because she's a foxy feline, and our hero is a lady killer. As an added bonus, she's a plot contrivance.
This is a movie about betrayal, revenge, an reconciliation, so it's really a movie that's about the opposite of different from other animated movies and not a small number of live-action ones. If you cared enough, you could predict each turning point in the film, but you and your kids will be better off just letting that tendency zoom right on by. You'll do yourself no favors by thinking about the plot and how uninventive it is.
See, unlike the Shrek movies that spawned it, Puss in Boots has precious few references to fairy tales, which is a shame. Jack and Jill were brother and sister in the old stories, and here they're husband and wife. And bad, bad people. So why even refer to them as Jack and Jill? Then the movie has to confuse Jack of "and Jill" fame with the Jack of "and the Beanstalk" fame; not the same Jack. That's sort of explained by a cameo by the latter in a prison for no good reason.
If you did enjoy the Shrek films - any of them - you're not likely to like this one very much. It lacks all of the charm and wit that helped make the others successful. Okay, so the third Shrek and maybe the fourth were both sort of mediocre, but each is much better than this one, which may as well have been done for television by the old Filmation studio that put out the He-Man cartoons each Saturday.