Let me tell you right away that the trailers I saw focused on about 5 minutes of the movie. I was expecting a movie all about Shrek and Fiona having a kid and it was anything but!
When I sat down in the theater to watch the movie I was not sure if it would be as good as the last two Shrek movies. Sequels have a bad habit of never being as good as the original, a third movie in a series often falls flat (Return of the Jedi anyone?)
The movie began rather slow and something began to occur to me, this is not the movie advertised to me.
That can often be the kiss of death for a movie. I remember when I saw the trailers for Bridge to Terabithia. I was expecting a Narnia knock-off (no I did not read the book before seeing the movie) and not the movie I got (which was far better). Why just this past week I saw a dreadful movie called The Fountain and the DVD jacket mentioned three different time lines and astronauts. I watched that movie and neither my wife nor I have any idea what it was about.
Shrek the Third did have some baby humor in the beginning of the movie when Shrek had a baby-filled nightmare. There was also some good humor during Fiona's baby shower. The actual baby humor did not come until the end. In fact, both my wife and I got a good chuckle at the end of the movie. In the last scene Shrek and Fiona are together in a now quiet house, they look at each other and say, "what should we do now?" If you are a parent than you know what they do next.
The core of the movie was about Prince Charming attempting to wrest control of the kingdom from Shrek. The whole time Shrek is trying to get someone else to become king because he does not want to be the new king.
There were two new voices added in for this movie. Justin Timberlake voiced the part of Artie and Eric Idle voiced the part of Merlin. What voice talent I did not realize was that of Regis Philbin, who played one of the ugly stepsisters.
Shrek the Third is an excellent movie. They did a very good job pulling off a third movie. If you have not seen it yet you should go and see it.
As a side note, the theater we went to had three movies playing, Shrek the Third, Spiderman 3 and Pirates 3. Notice a trend there?