Directed by Claire Denis. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Isaach De Bankole, Christophe Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, William Nadylam 15A cert, limited release, 106 min
The final Shrekfilm has the ogre in existential crisis, writes DONALD CLARKE
IT IS REASONABLE to complain when mainstream films cynically open their endings towards a potential sequel. On the other hand, one often detects a veritable wrenching of gears when the authorities attempt to follow up a film that has dutifully tied up all its loose ends. Comedies are particularly tricky in this regard; comedies involving fairy tales are even more so.
Didn’t you swear to us that – following weddings and Christenings – everybody was destined to live happily ever after?
Rather daringly, the makers of (we'll see, shall we?) the "last ever" Shrek film have taken the same approach to disrupting order as did the folk behind Sex and the City 2. Maybe marriage, parenthood and eternal monogamy are not all they're cracked up to be. As the latest film begins, the large green ogre is going through a minor existential crisis. Tourist buses now drive past his house to wave at the nice monster. Friends of his children regard his mighty roar as an amusing party piece. All the filthy glamour and dangerous renown he once enjoyed has coagulated into a morass of domestic conformity. As he snaps at Fiona, his equally green wife, and tries to devise some sort of escape, flavours of a most unlikely precursor begin to spread about the tongue. Have the makers of Shrek 4 really based their script on Revolutionary Road? Almost certainly not.
Anyway, the ultimate decision to send Shrek back to basics proves to be a wise one. The last film in the cycle – the one where he went to high school and so forth – was so fussy, over-complicated and directionless that it rendered any further elaboration hazardous. Hang any more plotlines on the franchise and it would surely implode beneath the weight of its own disorder.
Courtesy of a sly, sleazy version of Rumpelstiltskin, the film is allowed to turn itself into, essentially, It's a Wonderful Shrek. The hero makes a bargain that allows him to live one day as his old, frightening, single, undomesticated self but, not having read the small print, he does not realise that he has also bartered away his own birth and all his previous achievements.
Rumpelstiltskin now rules the Kingdom of Far Far Away and Fiona, re-imagined as a rebel leader, has no recollection of ever having met poor old Shrek.
Happily, after manipulating his contract with Rumpelstiltskin, the hero realises that – you’re way ahead of us – if he can win the love of the guerrilla Fiona then the world will be set to rights. Much falling-down ensues.
Shrek Forever Afteris not a great film. Working through old themes and jokes, it looks very much like the yellowed fag-end of a franchise that never really justified its spectacular success. Still, the picture is a significant improvement on the two films that preceded it. Since Shrekemerged in 2001, its snarky, post-modern tone has permeated family animation and rendered large swathes of it painfully unwatchable. Spare us another anthropomorphic take on Britain's got Talentor a further comical commentary on the decline of Lehman Brothers.
One senses that the Shrekpeople have looked upon their achievements and, like J Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, allowed themselves some despair and regret. At any rate, the writers have greatly rowed back on the pop-cultural references and encouraged a less referential, zanier class of humour to blossom. Okay, when the Pied Piper raised his flute, we do hear Sure Shotby the Beastie Boys. The rate of snark-flow has, however, slowed from a torrent to an agreeably steady trickle.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that Shrek Forever After– in boring 3D – may not be much of a film but it is pretty funny. Eddie Murphy's Donkey is still a hoot. Antonio Banderas's Puss in Boots, now fat and lazy, is even more uproarious than before. So Dreamworks has got away with it. But it might be best if the citizens of Far Far Away really were now left to live happily ever after.
