Throw up the spoofs and hope they stick

Rating: 7/10 (24 May 2004)

"Shrek 2" often tries to follow the pattern of movie spoofs designed as spoofs, and this doesn't necessarily mean following its own predecessor. There aren't many scenes without a foreground or background reference to either movies or pop culture. Be assured that even if you're trying to look while following the movie, you won't get them all.
At times I think the DreamWorks crew looked at a scene and thought "What can we add in here to spoof and/or skewer something else?" Thus a couple of blatant references to Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" (two of the elves get changed into a clock and a candelabra, a shot even more pointed than the dancing furniture) and somewhat gentler pokes at everything else from Garfield to "Lord of the Rings" to Love Potion Number Nine.
This spoof-shoehorning can be overwhelming at times, and sometimes it seemed the movie would have flowed better if we could just sit back and watch the main characters do what the plot wants them to do. The songs are more forced in this one too as DreamWorks tried to walk the line between the old Disney formula and Shrek's spoof-o-matic. (Disney itself has not followed the formula for about a decade, ever since the villain stopped getting his own song, but I digress.) The one song that did work was "Hero" near the end, which I enjoyed despite the slightly formulaic nature of the sequence (hero defeats obstacles, meets villain, final confrontation).
As for the other aspects of the movie, there are reasons this film got a PG in relation to the target audience of children. Edgier, however, does not necessarily mean "hipper" or "more entertaining".
I give "Shrek 2" a 7.5, in part against the overwhelming advertising but more because a 9 would have come without the overwhelming satire attempts. I did enjoy Puss, who stole the few scenes he was in. I wish Julie Andrews' character had more, but then we'd miss the payoff of the king's botched deal with the Fairy Godmother. Besides, how many other times can you get John Cleese and Eddie Murphy in the same movie? (That makes me wonder how such a spoof-laden medieval movie with John Cleese can get away without a single obvious reference to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", but the table was most likely already full.)