For all I know, there may be an endless supply of “Shrek” sequels in the pipeline. That DreamWorks ogre’s skin is the color of money after all. But there is nonetheless a feeling of finality about “Shrek the Third,” a sense that the tale has at last reached a state of completion.
In the first movie Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) met and wooed his lady love, Fiona (Cameron Diaz); in the second he got to know the in-laws. The current installment finds him faced with impending fatherhood and something of a career crisis. Will he take over his father-in-law’s business or remain true to his vocation of bellowing and smashing things? Unless the Shrek team wants to follow its hero into the dangerous swamps of mid-life, thus shifting his literary pedigree away from William Steig and in the direction of John Updike or Philip Roth, it may want to leave him in a condition of more-or-less happily ever after.
Which is only to say that “Shrek the Third,” directed by Chris Miller and Raman Hui from a script with a half-dozen credited begetters, already feels less like a children’s movie than either of its predecessors. (This may be why I liked it better than the others. But then again, so did my kids.) — A. O. Scott, The New York Times
In the first movie Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) met and wooed his lady love, Fiona (Cameron Diaz); in the second he got to know the in-laws. The current installment finds him faced with impending fatherhood and something of a career crisis. Will he take over his father-in-law’s business or remain true to his vocation of bellowing and smashing things? Unless the Shrek team wants to follow its hero into the dangerous swamps of mid-life, thus shifting his literary pedigree away from William Steig and in the direction of John Updike or Philip Roth, it may want to leave him in a condition of more-or-less happily ever after.
Which is only to say that “Shrek the Third,” directed by Chris Miller and Raman Hui from a script with a half-dozen credited begetters, already feels less like a children’s movie than either of its predecessors. (This may be why I liked it better than the others. But then again, so did my kids.) — A. O. Scott, The New York Times
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