Creating a monster

Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) tries to convince underachiever Artie (Justin Timberlake) to become the king of Far Far Away in Shrek the Third. (Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures)

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown — especially if that head happens to look like a lump of kryptonite and has a pair of ears resembling trumpets. In Shrek the Third, the cluttered second sequel in the animated series, the eponymous pea-green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) finds himself reluctantly thrust into the role of acting monarch of the kingdom of Far Far Away. His father-in-law, the frog-king Harold (John Cleese), is on his lily-pad deathbed and wants Shrek and Shrek’s wife, the princess/ogress Fiona (Cameron Diaz), to take over as rulers. Shrek, whose name might as well be “Shirk,” didn’t sign up for this — he only wants to get back to his cozy hovel in the swamp. Besides, Fiona is pregnant, and the very idea of being a dad is enough to plunge the responsibility-averse lug into nightmares. So, after Harold reveals another potential male heir, Shrek and his sidekicks head off on a quest to fetch the boy, a teenager named Arthur, and bring him to the throne.

The original Shrek won the inaugural Oscar for best animated feature, and Shrek 2 broke box-office records; PDI/DreamWorks knows it has a winning formula, and you can’t blame the producers for wanting to build on it. Their enthusiasm is palpable in every frame. Adding to the series’ continuing spoof of classic fairy tales, on this go-round they send up the Arthurian legend and introduce a quartet of empowered fairy-tale princesses who help Fiona fend off a coup d’état by the persistent Prince Charming (one of the baddies in Shrek’s inverted storybook universe). There are also scores of more conventional villains, from Captain Hook to The Wizard of Oz’s crabby talking trees, as well as a steady accretion of sight gags. What’s been lost in this cumulative process, however, is the character development that marked the previous films and the simple charm that distinguished the first, which was closest in spirit to the William Steig children’s book that inspired the franchise.

In the first two Shreks, we delighted in the misanthropic monster with the Scottish accent and his transforming love for Fiona, a princess who finds her true form as a curvy, cuddly ogress; she simultaneously turned the Beauty and the Beast tale on its head and flipped the bird at Hollywood’s penchant for underfed heroines. The two animated characters brought out the best in Myers and Diaz, and even their overexposed co-star, Eddie Murphy, as the chatterbox sidekick Donkey, became funny again. By Shrek 2, he’d found a perfect rival in Antonio Banderas’s silky-suave Puss in Boots, a swashbuckling feline who, when his rapier fails him, reduces his enemies to butter with his big, sad eyes.

Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy) and Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas) are Shrek's companions again in Shrek the Third. (Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures)

All four are back in this instalment, but Shrek and Fiona seem to be gliding on autopilot for much of the film, while Donkey and Puss get pushed to the margins as a cavalcade of new characters compete for our attention. There’s Arthur, a.k.a. Artie, who turns out to be a whiny loser languishing in a medieval high school. Although pop heartthrob Justin Timberlake does a credible job voicing him, Artie doesn’t make for an appealing secondary hero. Then there are Fiona’s gal pals, vocalized by Amy Sedaris (Cinderella) and Saturday Night Live ladies Amy Poehler (Snow White), Maya Rudolph (as Rapunzel with hair extensions) and Cheri Oteri (a narcoleptic Sleeping Beauty). That lineup promises a lot of comic potential, but, apart from Poehler, their talents are underused.

Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle fares better, bringing some of the old Python pizzazz to his vocal turn as a New Age Merlin who helps Shrek and Artie on their return journey to Far Far Away. A bandy-legged codger in Birkenstocks and a too-short wizard’s gown, he looks like your embarrassing hippie uncle, and dispenses psychobabble along with his magic spells.

The multi-author screenplay is full of witty stuff. Artie’s high school is a kind of Camelot 90210, where the jousting team comes complete with cheerleaders and the students speak as though they were translating Chaucer into Valley Girl. The best parody, however, comes later on. It’s a wickedly hilarious skewering of Disney’s classic Snow White (1937), in which Poehler — mimicking the sweet soprano of original vocalist Adriana Caselotti — gathers her little forest creatures to do battle with Prince Charming. In another of those nutty twists typical of Shrek’s incongruous soundtracks, her cheery song abruptly morphs into Robert Plant’s war cry from Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song and then into the chugging metal riff of Heart’s Barracuda. The movie’s climax offers yet another helping of parody, as drama-queen Prince Charming (the deliciously plummy Rupert Everett), previously reduced to doing medieval dinner theatre, makes his comeback by staging and starring in an overblown musical. It gives the filmmakers an opportunity to lampoon big-budget Broadway excess, but the trouble is that Shrek the Third is itself overblown and excessive.

The problem may be an embarrassment of riches; the Shrek creators have so many characters to work with now, they’re hard-pressed to do justice to them all. For one thing, there’s that second tier of sidekicks, the bumbling Three Blind Mice, the Germanic Three Little Pigs, the geeky Pinocchio, the doughty (or should that be doughy?) Gingerbread Man and Little Red Riding Hood’s cross-dressing Wolf, all of whom vie for face-time.

In trying to cram all these cast members and clever ideas into the plot, novice director Chris Miller loses sight of the finer qualities that made the earlier films more than just another exercise in CGI dazzle and adult irony. He and his colleagues seem to have forgotten that more than half the Shrek audience are children and that the movie’s story, as much as it parodies fairy tales, is a fairy tale itself that both kids and grownups can get caught up in.

Yes, there are visual moments in this Shrek when the hyper-realistic animation makes you utter a silent “wow.” (For me, it was the way the plume on Puss’s hat wafts softly in a breeze.) And there are moments of comedy — like Snow White on the warpath or Fiona’s queen mom (the enduringly prim Julie Andrews) showing off her martial-arts prowess — that are sublimely silly. But in the end, you’re left with a flat, disappointed feeling. The story and characters have barely advanced from Shrek 2, apart from Shrek and Fiona starting a family. And without spoiling the ending, let’s just say that, even there, the film’s creators can’t resist going over the top. It’s just one more example of their addiction to Shrek-cess.

Shrek the Third opens May 18.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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