|
This post is sponsored by Cool Hand Luke
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish - 3 and a half stars out of 4.
My biggest fear going into this was that I was going to find it an overrated mess as everyone and their mother around me just couldn't get off of its dong in praising it. And, yeah, it's not perfect nor the industry-changing spectacle I was expecting, but any nitpicks I found are more than made up with a ton of charm and humor and insight to where the movie can claim to wipe its ass with the entirety of the four Shrek films. Seriously, those look like amateur hour compared to what's here. I might be harsher than necessary as I've always found the original Shrek to be a boring, overrated fever dream. Things are done just so much better in this film.
It's surprisingly mature, with its exploration of Puss's character and the dilemma he faces. Sure, it loses some luster as it essentially boils down to yet another fetch quest, complete with multiple parties looking to complicate things for our protagonist, but like I said, it succeeds because of the way it's approached, with clever reimagining of these literary characters, Goldilocks in particular. The animation is so much better, too. I don't know what it is about previous Dreamworks films, but other than this movie and the How to Train Your Dragon series, I've always found the way they animated human characters to be an eye sore. Things look infinitely sharper, better, and interesting here, and the action sequences take a page out of Into the Spider-Verse to make them more fun.
Overall, fun is probably the best single word I could use to describe the whole thing. Getting through the Shrek movies has always been a chore for me, but I laughed more and was invested more here in the first 20 minutes than I can claim for those entire movies. The orphaned dog that Puss befriends alone is probably the greatest character created for the series aside from Puss himself. It's hard to find something to completely hate here.
|