Was a big Shrek fan, but not anymore.

Rating: 5/10 (21 May 2007)

Dreamworks has had a great series going with Shrek. The animation has been stellar, the stories unique and original, and the humor off-the-wall. The movies have been a delight and a welcome change from the standard sappy Disney fare (not that there's anything wrong with those). In fact, the first Shrek helped usher in the new age of CGI movies, and finally proved that someone other than Disney/Pixar could do it well. Shrek has been a wonderful series and one of my favorites - until now.
Unfortunately, this latest entry in the series just does not deliver in the same way that the first two did. While the first two had original ideas and were packed with satire and adult humor, this one is just boring and predictable and barely has a few chuckles. In fact, it seems as though they simply wanted an excuse to bring all the characters back together. Who can blame them? They're making heaps of money. But the characters have lost their charm. Donkey and Puss n' Boots have gotten boring, and don't even have many good one-liners. They've added some other side characters - princesses from other Disney movies - but they're lame. Even Shrek isn't very funny anymore.
On the positive side, the animation is excellent again. But I'm finding that even that isn't as impressive as it used to be. Honestly, I think Meet the Robinsons blew this movie away. The animation was a little better, the story was more interesting, the characters better, the moral issues less cliché, and it was even funnier.
The story in Shrek 3 revolves around 2 new unoriginal plot points. For one, Fiona wants to have babies and Shrek is freaking out. The other is the king is dying and they need to find an heir to the throne. They tell Shrek that there is a distant heir, Arthur, that he can go and find. This leads to an interesting twist on the old Arthurian legend. Lancelot and Arthur are still in high school, which provides for some humorous jokes about high school during the middle ages. They even run into Merlin, voiced by Monty Python alum Eric Idle, who is a retired crackpot magician at this point. But these few interesting moments can't save the overall dreariness of the story.
This movie does have its funny moments, but the problem is like most movies these days, they were all in the trailer. And maybe I see more trailers than the average person, but to me the jokes have gotten pretty old by the time I finally see them again in the actual movie. I loved the first two Shreks because of their awesome skewering of fairy tales, Disney stuff, and modern things. They would lampoon things like Burger King, Starbucks, Disneyland, etc. But that's pretty much all gone in this movie. There's a couple brief Bambi-bashing moments, and Snow White using her animal-calling songs as a weapon, but that's about it. Even the cool surprises like the fire-breathing dragon or Fiona turning into an ogre have disappeared. What we're left with is a standard mediocre formulaic kids movie that will bore adults. Of course, it will still gross hundreds of millions of dollars because kids have no standards, but I'm disappointed because I expected so much more.