Shrek the Third is, um, the third Shrek movie. Once again we have Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy, Antonio Banderas, Julie Andrews, Rupert Everett, and John Cleese, but we also add Justin Timberlake and Eric Idle.
King Harold the Amphibious (Cleese, and I added the appellation, it's not in the movie BUT IT SHOULDA BEEN) is dying, and the only heir he has is Fiona (Diaz), his daughter-turned-ogre. This means that Shrek (Myers) is about to be named king, but he's well aware that isn't the job he should have (though it's framed as him wanting to go back to his swamp, because being aware that monarchy is bullshit would be out of tone). He and his companions Donkey (Murphy) and Puss 'n Boots (Banderas) set out to find "Arthur," a long-long cousin or some shit of the king, because Shrek figures literally anyone is better than him. Oh, and Fiona is pregnant, which means Shrek spends most of the movie worrying that he'll be a shit father as well as having to be a shit king.
Meanwhile, Prince Charming (Everett) is eking out a living doing dinner theater and talking creepily to a picture of his dead mother, but then upon realizing that the king is dead and Shrek is leaving the kingdom for a while, he hatches an evil plan to unite all the fairy-tale bad guys and take over! And only Shrek the bridge of Disney princesses can stop him!
I mean, Shrek gets to be part of the final fight against Charming, sure, but his main arc is going to Worcestershire (a high school) and recruiting Arthur (Timberlake), who goes by Artie and is so lowly in the high school pecking order that even the D&D nerds dunk on him (oh, look, humor in which gamers are nosebleed-afflicted dorks, never seen that before).
This movie is better than I remembered, but it's still far and away (lol) the worst of the series. I was trying to figure out why that was, because tonally it's pretty similar and the main cast does just fine, so why do I look back on the other movies in the series with some fondness and this one with cringing?
For one thing, the soundtrack isn't great. It's not terrible, but one of the things about the previous movies was that the songs were perfect for the scenes. Here...like, during the frog funeral we get "Live and Let Die," which, like, it's about death, kind of, but it's not remotely appropriate for the circumstance and we all know the drop is coming and then it doesn't. "Immigrant Song" gives way to "Barracuda," and again, it doesn't really flow.
And also, pretty much everything Arthur-related falls flat and that's a rather big part of the story. It's not Timberlake, his performance is fine (less thrilled about Eric Idle as Merlin, but I think that's the interpretation of the character as much as the acting). I think it's because when the movies have co-opted other characters previously, there's been some respect for the source material even if the spin has been pretty dark (think Geppetto selling off Pinocchio in the first movie, but still almost loving referring to him as "this little wooden puppet"). Here...the joke is that it's high school in the Shrek-verse, fair enough, but there's no Arthurian mythos being tweaked, it's just a shy nobody named Artie, a jock asshole named Lancelot, a mean girl named Guinevere...there was so much they could have done with these characters, but it all got a one-note joke and then left behind so we could get back to the people we know.
The other, other thing is that the emotional moments in the first two movies felt earned, because Shrek would be a dick and someone would get through to him. Here, what happens several times is that Shrek yells at someone and then apologizes, and none of the moments have any particular weight.
Anyway, this is far more analysis than the movie deserves, but what else am I gonna do today?
My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Shrek Forever After
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