Total crap

Rating: 5/10 (8 November 2004)

Only slightly less bad than the original. The story is a little better, I suppose, and it adds a couple of amusing characters. Antonio Banderas would be the highlight as Puss In Boots, but he doesn't have nearly enough screen time. My favorite character was Jennifer Saunders as the villain, the Fairy Godmother. After that, though, the movie just sucks. How many dated jokes can they fit into one movie? Let's see, we have the 'Are we there yet?' gag, which The Simpsons made old in 1990. The ripples in liquid, which was done a million times the year after Jurassic Park came out. Is it really still funny 11 years later? In the first Shrek there were Macarena jokes, long after that song was forgotten. Here, we end with Ricky Martin's 'Livin' la Vita Loca' which was old and annoying before the original film even hit the theaters. And then there's a bunch of disgusting fart and snot jokes that even cheaply produced television shows would reject as too tasteless. The abundance of C-grade pop songs makes the film even more dreadful. I mean, what happened to Counting Crows? Their first two albums were great, and now they're doing one of the cheesiest love songs I've ever heard for this piece of garbage. And, worst of all, the animation is awful! Characters move around jerkily and there's little or no attention paid to physics. Just take a look at Pixar's The Incredibles to see the difference. Seriously, if Shrek 2 beats out The Incredibles for the Oscar this year, as the original beat out the far superior Monsters Inc., I will be as sad as I was at the results of the recent presidential election. 5/10.