Review: Shrek Forever After

Directed by: Mike Mitchell

Written by: Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke

Starring: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Julie Andrews, Antonio Banderas, John Cleese

Rating: [2.5/5]

When going through the drudges of everyday life, you can easily lose sight of the bigger picture of how good you have things. This certainly happens aplenty with men when they reach a certain age and feel they have passed their peak and see their inevitable decline. Shrek Forever After introduces the classic midlife crisis to our favorite ogre and while introducing some video game-like animation at certain points, it ends on such a high note that almost forgives it all. 

Inundated daily with his life as a parent, Shrek (Mike Myers) yearns for when he could do what he wanted and demanded fear rather than representing a roadside attraction. He gets presented the opportunity by Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) to trade a day of his life for one day where he could go back and relish his old life. However, without reading the fine print he puts himself in jeopardy of losing everything. 

Following the disappointing result of Shrek the Third, any expectation set for this film sat directly on the floor leaving no hope of a return to form for these films. With this feature, they pretty much have the same result but it came as quite the journey. Starting out at the beginning with a flashback of King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) looking to strike a deal with Rumpelstiltskin to retrieve Fiona prior to Shrek saving her demonstrated some shocking animation. For those who have watched movies and then played video games inspired by them, it gives off the same feeling of it having this cheapened look. In this case, they changed the animation style and the end result threw me off completely. One of those cases where you look at the screen long enough you get used to how these characters look now but if you look away from the screen for some time and look back, it becomes quite jarring once again. 

This undoubtedly made the film quite unwatchable for vast stretches and with such a lackluster story, this feature teetered on disaster. However, through all of the dreck, we still care for these characters, and having Shrek go through the journey of not realizing what he has until it’s gone allows for an emotional climax and ending that really hits hard. One of those instances where the first two-thirds of the feature struggles but stick the landing so well that you almost forgive everything that happened before. Well, almost is the keyword there.  

As for a villain, this go-around has Rumpelstiltskin, who certainly brings his own eccentricities to the movie and reverts to a more magic-centric story rather than what we experienced in the previous film. With the involvement of magic, contracts and how they operate dictated in this story in ways I certainly did not anticipate. Therefore, loopholes and exceptions played a major part in how Shrek could fix the situation he has found himself in which certainly brings a different perspective to how a villain can operate. Rumpelstiltskin proves ultimately very forgettable much like the majority of what occurs in this film. 

Something quite interesting to dissect when looking at these films as a whole and the journey Shrek has taken from the first to the fourth film. You have his initial quest resulting in love in the first film, the fortification with Fiona (Cameron Diaz) in the second, the anticipation of becoming a father in the third, and then the reality of being a family man in the fourth. Each chapter has its distinct emotional milestones for Shrek but it does raise some questions about why these filmmakers were able to nail the first half but when it came to Shrek becoming a family man, the films do not have the same sharpness or basic quality. Sure, directors came and went over the course of four films but a strategic vision existed evidently for these films and they lost their edge in the latter half. 

While ultimately disappointing, at the very least Shrek Forever After gives us the conclusion of a character we saw at his most irreverent over a decade preceding the release of this fourth chapter. We’ve been through this journey with this ogre as he sits with his family and you cannot help but smile when everything ends and he notices he has quite the life even if it does not emulate what he experienced as a bachelor back in the day. This high note did this film a big favor because everything in the first two acts suggested this could have been an unmitigated disaster.