The Domesticated Ogre

Shrek makes for a fun fractured fairy tale. It contains a surprisingly sweet romance without becoming too saccharine or losing its sense of humor. It's a little heavy on the potty humor for my tastes, but otherwise I find it quite rewatchable. When they were making a sequel, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I wondered if a movie so clever at skewering the typical Disney archetypes was itself about to suffer from the sequelitis that has undermined so much of Disney's legacy. On the other hand, I knew if they did it right, it could be just as entertaining as the first. I heard the new villain was a vengeful fairy godmother, and my hopes increased. It seemed quite promising...but somehow, in spite of the generally delighted response audiences had to Shrek 2 (it even made box-office history) the movie just didn't work for me. It took a lot of puzzling for me to figure out why.

( I guess I'm just one of those humorless feminists )