Review: Shrek the Third

Directed by: Chris Miller

Written by: Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, Chris Miller, Aron Warner

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

Rating: [2.5/5]

The gravy train can only roll for so long when it comes to a series of films where diminishing returns begin to become the reality. It happens to nearly all of them as the ideas run dry but the potential money the studio can rake in makes the machine continue to churn these out. Shrek the Third begins that descent as it takes one central sticking point area for Shrek worth exploring but lackluster everywhere else. 

With the passing of the King, Shrek (Mike Myers) has personally been appointed as the next heir, which he holds no interest in holding as he prefers to head back to the swamp. He’s informed he can pass along his right to the throne to a distant air named Arthur (Justin Timberlake) so he travels to go find him while Prince Charming (Rupert Everett) plots his revenge against the ogre. 

Coming off the high of Shrek 2 brimming with excellence, too much money presented itself on the table for the studio not to continue with these characters and put them in some sort of wily adventure both physically but also emotionally. On the emotional end, we have Shrek battling with his own personal fears of becoming a father made even more prevalent when Fiona (Cameron Diaz) announces to him she’s with child. Mixing in the fact he needs to find the next heir to avoid having to step into the crown and you have a man struggling with plenty mentally. This allows for something interesting to think about considering how much we’ve seen Shrek grow from the first scene we saw him living in complete isolation. He has his family with Fiona, Donkey (Eddie Murphy), and Puss (Antonio Banderas0 but now he must prepare for the inevitability of an expansion. 

The film does a fine job in that part, which dominates much of the story thankfully but where it really flounders comes from the journey to get Arthur and everything dealing with Prince Charming. The whiny prince in name only, worked well when paired with his coddling mother in the previous film, but when he operates as a villain on his own he just does not cut the mustard. Sure his whininess in demanding what he believes he deserves may cause a chuckle or two, but it does not make for a menacing villain. Everything surrounding his idea to bring Shrek to his play in order to slay him in front of everyone sounds petrifying in theory but doesn’t really make for anything very interesting as a whole. 

Then you have the journey with Arthur and in those moments the film well and truly drags. With a very short runtime, this film still felt long because of fairly large stretches of time where it moves at the speed of a turtle and does nothing interesting. We have Shrek and the crew visiting the high school where Arthur resides and absolutely nothing in those scenes measure up to the type of comedy this series of films has become famous for. It starts at the high school and only gets worse from there. 

This particular complaint really sums up the central issue of the story; the comedy does not have nearly the right amount of sharpness and ultimately becomes incredibly dull in moments. Sure some moments caused a bit of a chuckle, especially some of the lines delivered by Antonio Banderas, but a good percentage of it barely registered a smile. A statement I never thought I would say about a Shrek film. They just did not have the goods in this one, which makes it more obvious this feature served as a cynical cash grab with no creative juice pushing it forward but rather the promise of profits. Going off the box office results, the studio was certainly vindicated making over five times its budget back.  

One could easily forget this feature existed and with good reason. I guess we can just go back and consider the first two Shrek films a great duology and this only serves as a spin-off as it certainly gives off that vibe. It has none of the same energy, zip, or personality the other two features had and in no way justifies its existence. Sure, it gives us the excuse to hang out with these characters one more time, but when the final results look like this, they should have just left it alone.