Moody green giant returns

Noel Vera

Frontline critics have reached a consensus, more or less: "Shrek 2"
the further adventures of the cantankerous green ogre (from the book
by William Steig) is okay, if not as good as the original, unless
you weren't a fan of the original, in which case it's pretty good.

I did like the first movie. I wasn't a big fan of the animation--
looked like what most 3-D animation looked like at the time,
anonymous and tubular--but I did like the humor, the mix of lowbrow
slapstick and midbrow satire, spiced with a not-too-politely hidden
hatred for all things Disney and for its head, Michael Eisner
(producer Jeffrey Katzenberg's former boss), on whom Lord Farquaad
(a name a consonant away from being really insulting) was reportedly
based. The movie had a heart, but not an overly heavy one, just a
brave little flag hoisted on behalf of the lonely green ogres in all
of us.

"Shrek 2" begins strong, giving us home-movie footage of Shrek
(heavily brogued Mike Myers) and Fiona (game Cameron Diaz) enjoying
their honeymoon, mostly a collection of romantic clichés (the lovers
romping in a flowery field, or sharing a romantic mud bath in
candlelight--in this case, luminescent fairies trapped in jars)
turned on their heads (peasants with pitchforks run through the
flowers in hot pursuit, severe flatulence transforms the bath into a
muddy Jacuzzi). A message arrives: the King (John Cleese) and queen
(Julie Andrews) of the kingdom of Far, Far Away, Fiona's parents,
are inviting them to a grand ball in honor of their marriage. The
parents, of course, are unaware that Fiona is married to an ogre.

The movie bumps along happily with Donkey (Eddie Murphy) in tow,
playing a good game of Annoy Your Fellow Lead Characters. Perhaps
the high point is the family dinner, with Shrek and the King tearing
at the food and, verbally, at each other.

Then something happens; the air leaks out of the movie. Maybe it's
the introduction of the Fairy Godmother, whose son Prince Charming
(Rupert Everett) was supposed to marry Fiona in the first place;
maybe it's the plot, which laboriously tries to set up a break
between Shrek and Fiona without putting too much blame on either the
lovers or the parents. The middle third of the movie flounders in
too much introspective recrimination and plot exposition; the final
third picks up, but some of the energy has gone.

I can't say it's all Saunder's fault; she's funny enough in the hit
TV series "Absolutely Fabulous," and her Fairy Godmother is a
wonderful idea for a villain--the Corleone Family with a matriarch
in charge--but the actual execution is rather flavorless. Maybe they
needed to make her nastier; maybe we needed more Mafia jokes. You
only have to think of John Lithgow's pompous Farquaad, with his
relentless need to compensate for his shortcomings (and Shrek's
equally relentless needling of said shortcomings) to realize
Saunders had, uh, big shoes to fill. She has the talent, and there's
a nice subtext--her trying to micromanage Fiona and Charming's
marriage-to-be recalls the way agents like to micromanage
celebrities' sometimes messy lives--but for some reason the magic
just doesn't happen. Powerful and manipulative talent agents,
apparently, just aren't as entertainingly loathsome as
superegotistic studio heads.

That goes for the other targets. The skewering Disney got in the
first "Shrek" had a touch of cruelty in it that the skewering
in "Shrek 2"--this time aimed at Hollywood in general--lacks,
possibly because the target is too broad (and Hollywood is, very
possibly, beyond satirizing). The product placements jokes--
a "Farbucks Coffee," at one point, is trashed--seem less like jokes
and uncomfortably more like product placements. What in the first
movie seemed amusingly subversive has done a quarter-turn to become
mock-subversive--the way, say "The Simpsons" has become so
mainstream that celebrities do guest supporting voices to seem hip
and cool.

Rupert Everett is criminally wasted as the foppish Prince Charming
(true, Everett can do foppish, but he can also do so much more).
John Cleese as the King has some comic bite in the first half,
especially in the Gotterdammerung dinner opposite Shrek, but the
filmmakers seem to feel they can't be too disrespectful to Fiona's
parents, so they soften his character to the point of leaching all
the comedy out of him (to be fair, he does bring up a nice little
moral point later on). Julie Andrews as the Queen is given very
little to do. Antonio Banderas as Puss 'n Boots is a welcome
addition--he's added to annoy the already annoying Donkey--though
his change of heart (he's first assigned to kill Shrek) seems rushed
and perfunctory. Some of the guest voices are good; Joan Rivers as
herself didn't do much for me, but the Ugly Stepsister--a huge,
hulking, buxom maiden with a thin moustache and the voice of Larry
King--was weirdly appropriate.

Eddie Murphy works hard as a donkey as Donkey; he's especially
amusing when Banderas' Puss threatens to upstage him. Mike Myer's
Shrek is as likeable as ever, and it's nice to see that the ogre is
still spiky and unsociable, even after finding his true love; he
does, however, seem to mope a touch too much here, and when he goes
into action-hero mode, the action doesn't have much wit to it (the
best they could think of is a "Ghostbusters" homage and an impromptu
volleyball game with a magic wand). Cameron Diaz as Fiona fares best
of the three leads, showing more of her character and the conflict
between husband and family; it's to her credit that when we see her
as princess she doesn't seem as lively or expressive as when we see
her as a big, well-padded ogress…

"Shrek 2" isn't a total disappointment; the movie parodies are all
welcome, from "Lord of the Rings" to "Spiderman" to, best of
all, "Mission Impossible," and no movie where the Little Mermaid is
tossed into the sea for shark food, or a trapped Tinkerbell chokes
on an ogre's noxious emissions can be all bad. It's worth the price
of a ticket, though matinee would probably be the better bargain.

(First published in Businessworld, May 28, 2004)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)