Shrek Forever After
The once mean, still green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) has been transformed through true love, and in this final chapter, he feels a little tied down by domestic life. Shrek voices a wish to go back to the bad old days of bachelorhood, and is magically transported into an alternate reality where he sees his life without his wife. So how does the franchise finale fare, compared to the past three installments? Oh, did we mention it’s in 3D?
Bill Gibron from FilmCritic.com gave the animated feature a three out of five stars and has good news and bad news: “For once, the creators of this creaky series try something new and fresh. The bad news is that said attempted reinvention is still shrouded in the same old hackneyed humor.” Of the new stuff, like 3D action scenes, the critic complains it forces the feature to “zip and zing around the frame without rhyme, reason, or a sense of realism.” But don’t you worry: “While it can’t match the consistently clever classics created by others, ‘Shrek: The Final Chapter’ certainly ends everything on a better than expected high note.”
James Berardinelli from ReelViews delivers a solid three out of our stars rating along with this faint praise: “Even though ‘Shrek Forever After’ is obligatory and unnecessary, it’s better than ‘Shrek 3′.” He adds, “Unfortunately, for those hoping the final “Shrek” would find its way back to the wellspring of pure entertainment that marked the original, it doesn’t happen.” Still, he adds, “It’s likely that most who attend as a way of saying goodbye to the Jolly Green Ogre will not find themselves wishing they had sought out a more profitable way of spending 90-odd minutes.”
Geoff Berkshire from the Chicago Tribune only allows a two out of five star rating, and laments the last of the series is “Little more than Shrek’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’” and dismisses the latest installment as “Closer to a middling TV special than a blockbuster movie.” Adding, “The jokes are wan, the 3D underwhelming, the voiceovers largely uninspired.”
Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly explained her B- grade: “Everyone involved fulfills his or her job requirements adequately. But the magic is gone, and ‘Shrek Forever After’ is no longer an ogre phenomenon to reckon with. Instead, it’s a ‘Hot Swamp Time Machine’.”
Some reviewers, though, think this movie lets the franchise go out on top. “‘Shrek Forever After’ is, easily, the best sequel in the series,” says an enthusiastic David Poland of The Hot Blog. “It is the closest DreamWorks Animation film to the quality of Pixar in a long while.”
MacGruber
The “Saturday Night Live” ’80s spoof-turned-movie features Will Forteas the hapless hero who comes out of retirement to save the world, natch. The “SNL” sketch is a sendup of a “MacGuyver“-style guy who can’t ever be counted on to defuse a bomb. So who else do you call when you need to find a stolen nuclear warhead? There was no press screening — so you won’t see our typical review roundup here. But critics who previewed a rough cut at a recent film festival did weigh in…
John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that the movie is bent on sending up a “decade’s worth of action/adventure clichés.” He called the movie “utterly disposable but diverting” and adds that the spoof “stretches the material about as far as it can go.”
The blog IGN points out that the movie doesn’t veer far from the TV segments. Noting that the film takes shots at ’80s action flicks, the result is “a feature that does for that genre what ‘Austin Powers‘ did for 1960s spy flicks.”
Robert Dixter from Monsters and Criticsgives only one reason to see the film: “Kristen Wiig.”
