Yuck. Avoid this one, it's a waste of time.

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2001)

I went to see this one out of curiosity. After the wonderful "Prince of Egypt" and the reasonably entertaining "Ants", I was hoping that this one would at least be serviceable for popcorn fun on a rainy Saturday afternoon. But it wasn't.
Somehow, this movie seems to be designed for drab rainy Saturdays. "Shrek" is one of the most depressing and joyless films I have had the displeasure to watch in a long long time. It wants to be a carefree and rollicking frolic, but it's far too mean-spirited and sarcastic for that. It's dark and a reminder of how much innocence has been lost in the storm of Hollywood's current commercialized thinking, and its main driving emotions seem to be pain and anger.
Now I must admit that I haven't seen many movies this year. But that's deliberate: I've avoided most of the stinkers of 2001 like "Monkeybone" and "Freddy Got Fingered". So I'm not saying it's worse than those since I honestly can't say. But I *can* say that I didn't like it at all.
Do I really have to repeat the plot? Everyone probably knows it by now thanks to all the hype, so I'll just say its the basic hero-on-a-quest-with-a-sarcastic-twist formula.
The animation, it is true, is glorious. It's so beautifully designed and ups the medium of computer animation so high that it puts Toy Story and Toy Story 2 to shame. But just as it is with movies that rely entirely on special effects, gorgeous looks can't save a terrible script.
First of all, why is this rated PG and not PG-13? It almost made me vomit during just the opening credits alone. Don't take the kids to this thinking that it's innocent family entertainment. It isn't.
The much-ballyhooed fairy tale twist is merely a brief sidebar and mentioned for only about ten minutes or so of screen time. And the "funny" spoofs of fairy tales aren't funny. They're cruel. That's the only appropriate term I can come up with for this stuff.
Cruel? Well, let me put me put it this way: how else do you describe a scene that shows the three bears in cages with the baby bear in a smaller separate cage crying to his parents about how his cage is too small? And how we later see that Mama Bear has been killed and turned into a rug in the evil Lord's home? THIS is funny??? Or how about the torturing of The Gingerbread Man? Ho ho ho, someone calm me down, it's so hilarious I forgot to laugh.
An even worse problem: Shrek and his donkey sidekick are not likeable in this film. Eddie Murphy does a great job in his performance, but unlike "Mulan" he is allowed to babble on and on to the point where we find him just as annoying as Shrek does. Even worse, Shrek himself isn't likeable. He's obnoxious, selfish and self-protective. Of course this begins to change mid-film, but by then we barely care. And Myer's vocals here are dumb and uninteresting.
Oh yeah, and they use him as an excuse to pile on tones of needless toilet humour.
Avoid this one at all costs. If you want a cool spoof of fairy tales, try something along the lines of "Into The Woods". This sorry piece of trash actually bored me to the point where thirty minutes into it I was anxious glancing at my watch and contemplating leaving early.