Shrek the Third.

"From its humble, elegant origins as a slim children's book by William Steig, Shrek has metastasized into a symptom of and metaphor for the entertainment industry and modern culture in general," proposes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. So begins another summer movies catch-all entry, which naturally needs to include Keough's season preview: "It's almost as if studio moguls had taken a moment out from signing checks for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign to wonder: 'A woman in the White House? Maybe we should put a few in our movies, as well.'"

"Having just seen Shrek the Third, I'm now wondering if there's really such a thing as a kid," writes Carina Chocano. If the film's "any indication, what kids these days want from their stinky green ogres is a lot of Gen X parenting anxiety and career agitas mixed in with plenty of winky elbow-nudging about celebrity lifestyles." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King profiles director Chris Miller.

Updated through 5/20.

"Miller was in charge of story on Shrek 2, but I see no story at all here, unless you count a few haggard plotlines limping along on parallel tracks and colliding by dint of artless intercutting," writes the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor. Boy, this sounds familiar. A common 3quel ailment, evidently. "Like many another shoddy sequel, this one founders not only on the difficulty of extending a franchise beyond its natural life but on the unbearable strain of juggling a bunch of target demographics at once. Blinded by avarice and all out of ideas, once again Hollywood can't tell when enough is way more than enough."

Cinematical's Erik Davis sees the pattern, too: "Following two highly-entertaining and well thought-out installments in the Spider-Man franchise, we were offered a discombobulated third part that couldn't clean up its room without making it messier." And here we go again. "Donkey and Puss are shoved to the side, handed a cheap swap-a-voice storyline and kindly asked to remain in the background so that audiences can feast on a plethora of new faces. I truly hope that trend does not continue in future installments (which, mind you, were set up a number of times throughout), because it's part of the reason why this Shrek shtick is beginning to feel a tad old. But even with its weak spots, Shrek the Third achieves what most films do not - it entertains. It makes you smile. It makes you laugh. It makes you feel good. And while it's probably the only Shrek film I won't re-watch down the line, it's easily the first (of many, I hope) dynamite family comedy of 2007."

Updates: "Shrek The Third is the first depiction of a trainwreck I’ve ever witnessed set to 'mute,' writes Ray Pride in his zero-star review. I hate to steal your punchline, Ray, but it's too damn good: "I think the last word ought to be left for the youngest critic in the room the Tuesday night screening I attended, a croupy little girl who gooed loudly at a quiet moment about forty-five minutes in, 'Mommy, can we go home and watch Shrek?'"

Nathaniel R revives his "illustrated memoirs of summer movie experience as a kid."

"From the thrills of dragon-slaying and damsel-rescuing, Shrek's challenges have been reduced to a career decision: Should he become the king?" Roger Ebert, too, is disappointed. "The movie's always a pleasure to watch for its skilled animation. But it lacks truly interesting challenges. It makes the mistake of thinking slapstick action is funny for its own sake, a mistake made by a lot of Saturday-morning TV cartoons. True, characters zooming and bouncing around are easy to write because no creative invention is required to set them in motion. But so what?"

Updates, 5/18: "[T]he Shrek idea team seems to have become completely lost in the forest," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. This one "feels sluggish and tired; its relentless, not-so-great gags hit with the soft thud of stone-hard bread crumbs." And as for the overuse of 60s anthems, "maybe there's a difference between recontextualization and uncontextualization."

"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," suggests AO Scott in the New York Times. "Which is only to say that Shrek the Third... 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.)"

"[T]his execrable franchise dorkily scrapes the bottom of our collective pop-cultural barrel," grumbles Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Less belligerent in its audience pandering than its predecessors (less fart jokes, less homophobic subtext, and - thank Jesus - less squawking from Eddie Murphy), Shrek the Third may not give haters a migraine, but its lobotomized sense of comic brinkmanship is still without fun."

"I can't help but think that the 2007 Summer Movie Season (the one that's predicted to be the most profitable summer season of all time) is getting off to a fairly limp start," worries Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. Let down by Spider-Man 3, he now finds Shrek the Third "a little... lacking. Not terrible, but just sort of limp, obvious and lethargic."

Kevin Maher: "It opens next weekend around the globe, and guess what? Nobody's seen it. Not the critics, not the internet fanboys, not the friends or the family, not even the dog at Disney Studios. Nobody has seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."

Ok? So, also for the London Times, Will Lawrence talks with Orlando Bloom, Alan Franks with Bill Nighy.

Back to the blockbuster at hand. Here's the thing about Shrek for the Stranger's Andrew Wright: "It's a blockbuster phenomenon that wouldn't exist without the efforts of other films, and somehow smugly pats itself on the back for it.... To their credit, the filmmakers this time out dispense with the previous entries' manic pace and self-congratulatory pop-culture riffs to reveal that, at its core, their fable contains a heart of... well, nothing, really. Still, such limpness may be preferable to the ceaseless wink-wink nudginess of the earlier installments."

Andy Klein, evidently reluctant to dwell on Shrek, devotes the first third of his LA CityBeat review on thirds, and that is, of course, the fun part of the piece.

But lo, for the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, "Shrek the Third gets back the mood, the pleasure and even some of the freshness of its first installment."

"The only thing majestic about Shrek the Third is the title," counters Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail.

David Poland: "10 Things Studios Don't Want You To Know."

Hey, argues Mike Russell, "the script is roughly ten times more focused and less audience-insulting than, say, Spider-Man 3. And when it's funny, it's really funny."

Update, 5/20: "When the Weekend Moviegoer wants to write about movies he isn't going to see, no one can stop him, not even Mr Devil." Alan Vanneman's takes on the season's offerings are better and certainly more amusing than those of many a critic who's actually seen the slop.

Posted by dwhudson at May 17, 2007 7:39 AM