The lure of the sequel is strong.
        For at least 3,000 years, ever since that guy Homer followed up his hit about the Trojan War with a tale about a navigationally challenged sailor who took 10 years to get from Turkey to Greece, writers and other creative types have exploited the possibilities of taking familiar, popular characters and spinning a whole new story around them.
        And we – readers or, in this case, film viewers – eat them up.  Why not?  If you liked the first version, chances are good you’ll like the sequel.  If the characters and the story formula are popular enough, it can even become a franchise (see Rocky, Nightmare on Elm Street, Harry Potter, etc.).
        So we have Shrek 2, which opened this week on three of the nine screens at Carmike Cinemas.  The market saturation of the film, along with advertising tie-ins to everything from Burger King to Hewlett Packard to newspapers, practically guarantees its financial success.
        But is it good?  Or rather, is it as good as the original Shrek, an Oscar winner that captivated audiences three years ago with the combination of witty fairy-tale parody and cutting-edge computer animation?
        The success of sequels depends greatly on the expectations you bring to the film.  My companions came to the sequel with minimal expectations, knowing that sequels seldom measure up to the original and not being particular fans of Shrek, and found their expectations met – for them, it was an enjoyable entertainment.
        Unfortunately, I came in with much higher expectations, having read the advance publicity proclaiming Shrek 2 even better than its predecessor.  It is not.  It is, indeed, entertaining, with an interesting if fairly conventional plot, some wickedly funny visual jokes, a satisfactorily happy ending, and good animation.  But it lacks the originality and freshness of the original.
        One more thing – although it is presented as a family film, it has a much more “adult” feel than Shrek.
        Like the earlier film, Shrek 2 is at its heart a meditation on the relative unimportance of appearance, the need to accept people for who or what they are.  But the particular issue of this film – will the ogre Shrek be accepted by his new, human in-laws? – is fundamentally a concern of adults, not kids.
        Some of its elements are a bit, shall we say, dark?  The father-in-law puts out a contract on his new son-in-law; the fairy godmother, whose celebrity is milked for laughs in the film’s ongoing parody of Hollywood, is also a rather nasty social climber and operates a sweatshop (which Shrek infiltrates by posing as a union representative).
        Even many of the pop-culture allusions, one of the joys of the original, will resonate more with my generation (on the shady side of 50) than with today’s children or even their parents.  Rawhide? Sanford and Son? Flashdance?
        There are, of course, many delightful scenes that will enthrall children and adults as well – in particular a wild trip through the godmother’s factory that suggest the best amusement-park ride you can imagine and a high-energy closing sequence to the tune of “Living the Vida Loca.”  And there are clever allusions to children’s film past: the godmother’s workers are like the Oompa Loompas of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and there is a transformation scene like that in Beauty and the Beast.
        The best new character, though, is Puss in Boots, a feline hit man voiced by Antonio Banderas and played as a campy Zorro wannabe.  When Puss is on the screen, Shrek 2 has some of the cleverly inventive feel of the first movie.

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This page last updated on May 26, 2004.