Dreck (5/10)

Rating: 5/10 (13 January 2002)

(I watched this on widescreen DVD, YMMV)
Without Eddie Murphy, this movie would be a horribly painful experience. As it is, he makes it barely watchable. Murphy has a longer leash here than he did in Mulan, and uses the freedom to create some truly hysterical comic moments. But they are too few and too far between to recommend this movie
Shrek has terrible computer animation; terrible voice by Mike Myers ["Shrek, the Ogre with the Scottish Accent"]; and a painfully strange obsession with an assault on Disney.
The computer animation is so bad that in every scene it overwhelms everything else. Shrek and the Princess are rendered well enough, but the rest of the characters and the background look like they were designed by elementary school kids with Apple II computers. When the town comes to storm Shrek's swamp in the beginning, I actually laughed out loud because the townspeople look so bad. The pre-rendered scenes in many old videogames (like WarCraft II or Age of Empires) look better than this.
Mike Myers does a terrible job as the voice of Shrek. Shrek has a bad Scottish accent and I am beginning to wonder if bad Scottish accents are all that Myers can do. I was waiting for Shrek to break out in "If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!" [Stuart Mackenzie, So I Married an Axe Murderer], or "Look at me, I'm sexy!" [Fat Bastard, Austin Powers]. Shrek sounded like a bad blend of the two and never gained a voice of his own.
Finally, the Dreamworks team has some weird obsession with Disney that comes out in creepy ways in this movie. All kinds of "fairy-tale" characters that Disney made famous appear in unflattering ways. Snow White is referred to as "the dead broad." There is a recreation of DisneyLand with dolls that sing off-color songs, and the city is so "perfect" that there is no one there. Why not? Very strange.
Overall, I've seen worse, but this was pretty bad.