‘Shrek the Third’
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Los Angeles, CA (rushprnews) May 18, 2007 -Film critics, who by and large have been giving the recent crop of movie sequels decidedly mixed reviews, have not changed their tone with the release of Shrek the Third, which officially opens today Friday but is also being screened at many theaters beginning at midnight last Thursday.

In her review in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Eleanor Ringle Gillespie acknowledges that given the massive fandom that the Shrek character has produced, “whether or not li’l old me likes Shrek the Third isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans.”

Still, she remarks, the movie is “not very good” and later, “The magic is gone.” Many of the same critics who are writing negatively about the film had praised the original two installments. One of them is Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who writes, “It grieves me to report that the third time is charmless. … Shrek the Third isn’t a movie, it’s the extension of a brand.”

The cancer-recovering Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times pays a return visit to the movie franchise only to find it “lacking the comic energy of the first brilliant film and not measuring up to the second.”

Christy Lemire of the Associated Press writes that the movie is “smothered in a suffocating sense of been-there, done-that.” Or as Claudia Puig puts it in USA Today, “The main element that’s missing in this third go-round is the sense of fresh discovery felt with the 2001 original.” Carina Chocano opines that too much of the kids movie is aimed not at kids but at their parents. “Does a kids’ movie really need, among other similar touches, a Hooters joke?” she asks. “I, for one, wouldn’t want to have to explain it.” Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News objects to a scene in which “a husky, whisker-studded transsexual princess says of Prince Charming, he ‘makes me hotter than July.'”

Then again, Kyle Smith in the New York Post notes that the film ends with “a salvo of poop, farts and belches — delightful to 5-year-olds, but then so are belly buttons, kazoos and Night at the Museum.”

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