PUSS IN BOOTS:
THE LAST WISH
(directed by Joel Crawford, 2022)
***+ (out of 5)
.
> Once more, o fearless feline, into the breach!
. I enjoyed most of the admittedly uneven SHREK movies, but the best thing about them was the fact that they spawned this spinoff franchise that never fails to deliver a charming, character-centric adventure that the whole family can enjoy. Sure, it degenerates into a series of ever-more frenetic action sequences before it’s over- they all do, but you can’t have a story about a lovable swashbuckling scallywag without some swashes being buckled… or something like that.
. In this outing, the gleefully self-mythologizing action hero finds that his reckless bravado in the face of Death has caught up to him, when his doctor in the afterlife informs him that he has used up 8 of his 9 feline incarnations. Like it or not, it is time to retire the Puss-in-Boots persona and just be a complacent housecat somewhere- which is exactly what he does, going to live with a bright bubbly cat-lady and her hoard of zillions of stray cats. She dubs him “Pickles”. Pickles! Oh, the indignity of it all! For a while, he just complies, learning to be as passive and listless as all the other inmates in the cramped flat. But when Puss discovers there is a mystical map that charts the way to The Last Wish of whoever holds it, the requisite epic journey is on to steal that guidestone from bloated baddie Jack Horner and use it to restore his nine lives. Along the way, he hooks up with the cat he left waiting at the altar and a preternaturally cheerful dog in cat’s clothing, and they set off on the quest together. Along the way, Puss meets his ultimate adversary: Death, appearing in the guise of a bloodthirsty wolf- a figure that is ever closing in as he gets closer to that final day of reckoning.
. DreamWorks adopted a style that is calculatedly lo-fi, giving it a more abstract, painterly look. Don’t know that I’ve ever seen an animated film that looks quite like it, and I liked the design a lot. It was occasionally very funny, and curiously, occasionally very flat. Some awesome sequences using high-contrast comic-book effects were followed by bits that just didn’t seem to work. A prime example: a major, important event happens, but the score just continues in a la-de-dah kind of way, never reflecting the great drama suddenly unleashed on the screen. It just struck me as a terrible oversight. Didn’t anybody notice this? And worse, John Mulaney’s sardonic voice did not match his character even 1%. It flat-out didn’t work for me. I cringed every time Jack Horner opened his puffy lips. It is such a confounding disconnect that it creates a cognitive dissonance that draws you away from the narrative and into the mechanics. The film suffered from this unevenness.
. But when it was good, THE LAST WISH was very good. The best thing about it: the vocal talent. Antonio Banderas is simply terrific. Not since Sterling Holloway voiced Winnie the Pooh has an animated character’s voice so perfectly matched their persona. (Well- maybe since Charles Fleischer voiced Roger Rabbit…) It’s a marriage made in cinema heaven. His counterpart is ably voiced by Salma Hayek Pinault and the good-natured chihuahua, perfectly brought to life by Harvey Guillén. Goldilocks is voiced by the ubiquitous Florence Pugh and Mama and Papa Bear are animated by the expressive voices of Ray Winstone and Olivia Colman.
. THE LAST WISH really succeeds when it is dealing tenderly with the grand themes of life, love, death and friendship. And the big battle our heroic gato has with Death in wolf’s clothing? Epic! It would be nice to have 8 lives after this one, wouldn’t it? But none of us are cats.
– We gotta make do with this one.
*
© Kevin Paul Keelan and lastcre8iveiconoclast, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kevin Paul Keelan and lastcre8iveiconoclast with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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