Film Review: Holidays Granted in ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

CHICAGO – The Shrek franchise, which had been showing signs of creative exhaustion dating all the way back to “Shrek The Third,” gets an unexpected dose of new life with this belated – and better than it has any right to be – sequel “Puss In Boots: The Last Wish,” focusing on the swashbuckling feline (voice of Antonio Banderas).

Rating: 4.0/5.0

The cat is basically Zorro with fur, and it’s perfectly suited to Banderas’ Latin purr. This film finds the adventurer unexpectedly down to his last life after wasting eight of his nine lives on exploits both heroic, and stupid. He’s haunted by the Big Bad Wolf (Wagner Moura) a whistling bounty hunter who is the embodiment of death, and settles down to a tamed life in the care of the cat lady in fairy land. While there, Puss in Boots grows a beard and trudges through his days drowning his sorrows in leche, while a mangy therapy dog named Perro (Harvey Guillén) establishes himself as the de facto sidekick to our hero.

Puss is soon is shaken out of his stupor when Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the Three Bears (Ray Winstone, Olivia Coleman and Samson Kayo) show up to proposition him to steal a map to the mythical “Wishing Star.” G and the Bears are reimagined as a English crime family, which leads to some mild chuckles and an overuse of the phrase “just right.” This leads Puss in Boots to reunite with his love interest, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), who helps him double cross the Bear gang, steal the map, and go on a quest to find the Wishing Star, which Puss in Boots hopes to use to get his lives back and restore his sense of danger and daring.

Continue reading for Spike Walter’s full review of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Continue reading for Spike Walter’s full review of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”