movies: puss in boots

I have to say that I was a little dubious when I heard that the Puss in Boots character from the Shrek movies was getting his own movie.

It really did smack of milking the franchise a little too much.

But it turns out that it's actually not a bad movie. Not particularly original or unique in the particular story it sets out to tell... but pleasant enough in the telling.

As with every new generation of CGI movies, it was incredibly lush... textures, effects and especially human beings look amazing. I'm sure if you compared it with the original Shrek movie it would look like that was drawn in crayon by comparison.

Antonio Banderas has a great sense of comic timing as the titular feline (although how much of that is actually created after the fact in the editing room is anybody's guess) and the addition of Salma Hayek and Zach Galifianakis fills out the major voice rolls beautifully.

One thing I did notice, and I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, about Hayek's "Kitty" was that she looks particularly human when she's standing upright. Whether it's because they've tried to put the human female curves into a cat body, or what, I don't know... but it just looked odd a couple of times. It may also be because the movie essentially sits at cat scale rather than when we've seen Puss before in Shrek where he's tiny because the movie is all Shrek scale.

There was also some interesting uses of existing nursery rhyme characters within the story (Jack and Jill specifically) as there tends to be within the Shrek universe.

The weakest part is probably the predictability of the story... it borrows from any number of heist pictures but I'm not sure if contributes anything new (other than lightfooted kitties and a talking egg man). But it manages to be entertaining for almost all of it's fairly short run time.

yani's rating: 2 golden eggs out of 5