The New Road

Shrek The Third

Critics be damned, I liked Shrek The Third and Megan liked it too. She is going back for a second round in a couple of days and that proves it. She even gives it the 'big thumbs up'.

It's different from the other two. It's more complex. There are more characters and more plots to service. And given that they probably have a fixed running time to work with, there are only so many scenes and they can be only so long. So that means that the luxuriant scene lengths of the past, which allow them to do build-ups and pay-offs which create cinema classics, are gone.

That doesn't mean the movie is bad though. It's just more modern than the other two. It's a bigger film, there are more locations, more action, more story, more everything. And it's honestly, all high quality goodness. There are some standout moments; the high school sequences, the jail scene between the princesses, most of the scenes Charming is in, etc.

Is it my favorite Shrek movie? That's a tough question. I look at Shrek and Shrek II as different movies from this one. And between those two I would pick Shrek II, and say that this is a tangential work to that. In reality, all three of the movies are great.

I do have some minor gripes. While some of the humor was very edgy, there wasn't as much edge as there was in the second movie. I thought the princess attacks scene with the birds and the Led Zeppelin soundtrack worked better on paper than on the screen. It felt like they knew it didn't work but that they paid so much for the rights to the song that it had to be there. The climactic scene, while good, didn't have the same energy as the climax in Shrek II. And finally, the princesses weren't clearly defined to me, I couldn't figure out which one was Beauty, and because of Megan that's important to me.

I also have to give this movie a bit of the benefit of the doubt because I was so hard on Shrek II right after I saw it, and it has definitely warmed on me since.