The Fourth, and supposedly final, Shrek film. I enjoyed my time watching this, and rewatching it, and I plan on enjoying it when I watch it again in the future. BUT. I have to deliberately not think for that to work.
It is Shrek’s kids 1st birthday and Shrek is feeling overwhelmed at being a responsible adult and has a fight with his wife Fiona and gets tricked by Rumplestiltskin and has to convince Fiona (because the world changed) to fall in love with him all over again, only now she’s in ogre form and leading a band of freedom fighter ogres against Emperor Stiltskin. And of course it happens and the world is back on course and we get our happily ever after.
There’s a lot of grrrrl power lingo jazz thrown around and at one point Fiona states that she had to save herself. It was not subtle or woven in, but just hammered. Then you have Shrek not being able to cope with being a dad and not an ogre any more. I feel like the writers didn’t know how to deal with family life and so just put Shrek in a situation that they remembered from some sit-com way back when.
At the same time, I thought the basic idea was very good. Shrek gets to be a complete ogre for one day in exchange for giving one other day to Rumplestiltskin. So Rumple chooses the day of his birth, so Shrek never gets born, never rescues Fiona and thus they never fall in love and have a family. Shrek comes back to this world, he remembers how it is supposed to be and has until midnight to convince Fiona that they are indeed true love’s vessels. It was silly but at the same time it was heart breaking. The relationship between Shrek and Fiona has always been the backbone of the franchise, no matter how shallow or trivial, and to see that ripped away from only one of them really amped up the pathos for me.
This was a decent end to the franchise.
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