Please be the last one

Rating: 4/10 (9 June 2010)

The Shrek series is ending at least two movies too late. The first two were plenty of fun, but the third one was merely okay and this final one is just tepid, sleepwalking through its own milieu with a script that seems to have had all the jokes removed.
As movie series progress, the makers must come up with new situations for their protagonists to experience. So here, Shrek makes a deal with Rumplestiltskin that alters the timelines of him and everyone else in Far, Far Away: he gets one day in which to live as a regular old ogre, just like before he met Fiona and Donkey; in return, Rumplestiltskin gets one of Shrek's days for himself. Turns out he chooses the day the big green fella was born, which (obviously) means a new timeline in which he never saved Fiona from the castle (among other things).
It's almost a crutch, having a main character live his life in an alternate timeline, because that way you can have that main character re-meet all his friends. It's like getting a second origin story. And sure enough, we meet several of the characters from the earlier films, such as Pinocchio, the Gingerbread Man, and the Three Little Pigs, not to mention Donkey's red-dragon wife. And naturally, because everyone in this timeline is used to a world in which Rumplestiltskin is large and in charge, Shrek needs to do a little convincing. Not the least of which is to Fiona herself, because – as the ironclad contract with Rumple notes – only true love's kiss can break the deal.
The thing I liked most about the first couple of Shrek movies was the unending patter of jokes. Lots of pop-culture references (anachronistically), many of which worked. Lots of gross-out gags, too. And great chemistry between characters, even though they'd just met. It all sort of clicked then, but none of that is apparent in this fourth installment. The humor is, at best, scattershot – and not in the Airplane! style, either, where characters make seemingly hundreds of jokes a minute, with some working and some not. It almost feels as if there were a joke quota here, only it's a maximum of two per reel.
Shrek 4 is charmless, too. I know we're supposed to root for Shrek (and the ending isn't unsatisfying), but his adventures trying to get his true love's kiss are sometimes tedious and uninspired. The problem here is that Shrek the character is supposed to be a grouchy bastard, but he's typically offset by the wild extrovertism of Donkey and the sweetness of Fiona. And since this alternate timeline indicates that neither has met Shrek, neither gets to balance out his irascible behavior.
There were plenty of little tykes in the theater this morning, and I didn't really hear a lot of oohs and ahhs or laughs. It could be that Shrek Forever After failed to be broad enough in its humor and yet too intense in its action to appeal to its core audience. The series can finally rest.