Dreamworks and Paramount brings the third adventure of everybody’s favorite ogre home with the visually jaw-dropping release of ‘Shrek the Third’ on HD-DVD.
Unfortunately, the impeccable high-definition visuals might be the only thing to keep you watching as with most third flicks in a series, ‘Shrek the Third’ comes up a bit lacking.
Like this summer’s other big franchise third entries like ‘Spider-man 3’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End’, which along with ‘Shrek the Third’ were all released in May and led to comparatively disappointing BO returns, third attempts at a franchise are notorious for being failures – everything from ‘Superman III’ and ‘Alien 3’ to ‘The Godfather Part III’ – and ‘Shrek the Third’ doesn’t break this notoriety streak (although I would argue ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ released later in the summer proves the exception).
Of course, ‘Shrek the Third’ isn’t a bad film and I’m sure it will still manage to entertain the tykes, but the novelty, dare I say the magic of the first film, seems long gone. ‘Shrek 2’ didn’t hold much of a candle to the first ‘Shrek’ which I loved, and now ‘Shrek the Third’ continues the downward spiral. It just seems like everybody is going through the motions with not much motivation besides money. Only Antonio Banderas as Puss n’ Boots seems like he’s having any fun.
So picking up where the second one left off, with all the usual characters and voice characterizations back – Mike Myers as Shrek, Eddie Murphy as Donkey, Cameron Diaz as Princess Fiona, Antonio Banderas as Puss n’ Boots, Julie Andrews as Queen Lillian, John Cleese as King Harold and Rupert Everett as Prince Charming – the third entry throws yet more characters at us which leads us to one of my main gripes with the pic; there’s just too many darn characters the story has to juggle and by consequence Shrek and Donkey, the two characters who should be the mainstays, get pushed to the sidelines by default.
But I digress, our story starts off with Shrek and his lovely wife Princess Fiona suffering the machinations of royal life – well, really just Shrek, who yearns to get back to his lovely, disgusting swamp. Returning to the swamp proves to be even farther away than he thought when the poor frog-King Harold quite literally croaks in a protracted sequence where King Harold lets Shrek know that he’s next in line for the throne and will have to dutifully take over the kingdom…if he can’t find the one other person that could rightfully take over, another relative called Artie.
So Shrek, Donkey and Puss n’ Boots take off on a sea voyage to recruit young Artie and bring him back to the kingdom ‘Far, Far, Away’ with Shrek having further worries about possibly being a dada (we know his pal Donkey already made the leap to fatherhood at the end of Shrek 2). Arriving at this new land called Worchestershire, which has a striking resemblance to a valley high school complete with annoying teenage girls who lace their speech with ‘like’ and ‘whatever’, they find their Artie in the form of dweebish teenager who gets picked on by school bully Lancelot…get it? Artie aka Arthur? Lancelot? Hardy-har.
So promising Artie (Justin Timberlake) a kingdom, they ship off back to their kingdom only to run aground and coincidentally run into one of Artie’s old teachers, Merlin (Eric Idle) – now a broken-down old weirdo who lost his magical touch. Meanwhile, Prince Charming has riled the villains of fairytale land including Captain Hook, a few Wicked Witches and some evil-spell cursed Trees to help him in his quest for revenge after a failed attempt at dinner theater.
Storming the castle now inhabited by the ladies of the kingdom – Princess Fiona, Queen Lillian, Snow White, Cinderalla, etc. – the villains easily take over the kingdom with Prince Charming’s plan to murder Shrek in front of an audience falling into place. Will the boys make it back in time? With the girls have to take upon themselves to defend the kingdom? And why doesn’t this lame kingdom have an army? All these questions and more will be answered by the end of ‘Shrek the Third’. Whoopie!
While the CGI has definitely improved, every facial and physical nuance is now easily recognized, with exquisitely detailed environments and backgrounds, the script has definitely not improved. The voice cast still seems game but as I stated before, only Banderas actually seems to inject any zest into his performance although this lack of zest on Myers part is probably just due to a dull, joke-starved script with scenes haphazardly placed and falling all over each other.
There’s some cleverness here i.e. the frogs breaking out into a rousing rendition of ‘Live and Let Die’ during the Frog King’s funeral, Snow White ordering an attack with screams appropriately timed to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigration Song’ but these moments are few and far between and the music always ends up frustratingly truncated for some reason…could ‘Shrek the Third’ really be that cheap on the musical clearances?
Luckily, the high-definition visuals almost make up for it….almost. The 1.85:1 VC-1 encode is a marvel to look at as is expected for digital-to-digital transfers. Sharp, vibrant colors make up most of ‘Shrek the Third’ which make it the perfect candidate for an HD release. Now here’s hoping Dreamworks gets to work on HD releases of the first two. The audio, while impressive, and offered in Dolby Digital Plus, doesn’t quite match the demo quality of the visuals but certainly gets the job done.
Special Features start off with ‘The Animator’s Corner’, a Picture-in-Picture feature that plays throughout the feature displaying storyboards, deleted scene pitches and technical goofs. Some cool stuff here but the majority of this feature is storyboards which are usually less then thrilling for most people.
This feature is HD-DVD exclusive along with ‘My Menus’, a cool extra that allows the user to customize the menus to their liking using different characters from the pic. For those with an Ethernet connection, you can also get some new web-enabled features that include a trivia track that plays throughout the pic.
Other features include ‘Shrek’s Guide to Parenthood’, where various characters offer up parenting tips, ‘Meet the Cast’, a short featurette that looks at the voice cast, four ‘Lost Scenes’ in storyboard form only, ‘Big Screen Goofs’, ‘The Tech of Shrek’, ‘Donkey Dance’, ‘Dreamworks Animation Video Jukebox’ that includes choice song snippets from other Dreamworks Animation pics, previews for ‘Bee Movie’ and ‘Kung Fu Panda’ and three ‘Dreamworks Kids’ games that include ‘Merlin’s Magic Crystal Ball’, ‘Learn the Donkey Dance’ and ‘How to be Green’. Overall, not a bad collection of extras, but there’s very little meat here; mostly just fluff.
The production values are top-notch, the music is well-picked as always and the high-def transfer is excellent but ultimately the pic just isn’t that funny and combined with the noticeable lack of heart this time around – I can’t chalk this one up as anything but a disappointment.
If you have kids, I’m sure they will be begging for it and not notice the hit in quality but for casual adult fans of the series, I’d definitely recommend a rental first. The film for me would only rate two and a half stars, but the high-def package as a whole takes it up a notch.
Shrek the Third HD DVD is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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