After nine years of wedded marital bliss, Shrek is less an ogre and more like a bored Fred Flintstone. He's got a rack o' kids, a loving wife he's grown too comfortable with, and Donkey serving as his own personal Barney Rubble. Tired of becoming a sideshow oddity to tour groups, perceived as a non-threatening celebrity, he longs for the days of terrorizing villages and being chased by poor rubes with pitchforks. He wants to be a swingin' bachelor again!
After a disastrous birthday party for his kids, Shrek finally unleashes his pent up frustration at the crowd of well wishers. Fiona, unsure of her husband's reaction, pushes him until he reveals that he wishes for a time when things were so much simpler. Basically he just takes one big ogre dump on everything their life has ever been since he first rescued her from the tower she was imprisoned in. Just so happens that someone was listening in on their conversation.
That someone is the diminutive trickster, Rumpelstiltskin. Years earlier, Rumpel had been visited by Fiona's grieving parents, who were desperate to break their daughter's curse. In exchange for his help they were willing to hand over the entire kingdom to him, but Shrek came to the rescue and broke the curse just in time. Now he's destitute, nobody willing to sign his binding magical contracts for help, and all appears pretty bleak. Shrek's desire for the good ol' days is a possible lifeline. Rumpel convinces Shrek to sign over just one day of his life in exchange for a day of blessed freedom from responsibility. As is usually the case with devilish contracts of this sort, Shrek didn't think it through, and the day Rumpel takes is the day Shrek was born.
What follows is Shrek's own version of It's a Wonderful Life, with the ogre firmly in the George Bailey role. The world has gotten terrible without his presence. Donkey is a slave; Puss 'n Boots(Antonio Banderas) looks like Garfield; Fiona is a brutal warrior princess; and Rumpel is the king, lording over the land with an iron fist and a hilarious assortment of wigs.
It's a scenario that's ripe for allowing us to fall in love with these characters all over again as Shrek must literally get reacquainted with them as if he's never met them before. He becomes familar with the qualities that made him and us become so attached to them in the first place: Fiona's independence and strength; Donkey's silliness and loyalty.
Dreamworks does the right thing by shedding the overabundance of pop culture jokes in favor of straight ahead, quality storytelling. There are less jokes here than in other Shrek films, but the ones that land hit hard. The Gingerbread Man performing his own scene out of Gladiator is downright hilarious, and Rumpel's army of witches need their own spinoff like right now.
The voice acting is solid, featuring Craig Robinson, Jon Hamm, Meredith Veira and others beyond the main cast. One of Dreamworks biggest problems in the past was that they tended to go overboard with getting big name voice actors for roles that didn't fit them at all. It was a distraction. I never got that feeling this time.
The 3-D is pretty useless. This is another film that proves to me that 3-D is a wasted feature unless you're going all out like James Cameron did in Avatar. You need to build a movie from the ground up for it. There are very few scenes that even attempt to utilize the feature, mostly in the closing action sequence. Do yourself a favor and see it in plain old steam-driven 2-D.
It's a shame that I find a reason to care about Shrek again just as it's going away. I'm man enough to admit that I got a bit sniffly at the end, but that only emphasizes that the heart of this franchise has once again been found. Shrek ends with a montage looking back at the key characters and moments that defined it over the years. I have my doubts that we've seen the last of Shrek or any of his castmates(there's a Puss 'n Boots movie that's been in development for a bit), but if it is his swansong he's gone out on a high note.
