The Holidays Are Granted in ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’

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Rating: 4.0/5.0

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).

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 in Boots: The Last Wish
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

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.

And iff that weren’t enough, they’re pursued by Pie impresario and crime kingpin Little Jack Horner (John Mulaney) who is imagined here as a grotesquely obese man-child out to corner the market on magical accouterments. It’s a lot to take in for this little bit of brand extension, and the plot itself is entirely too busy trying to come up with hackneyed fairy tale logic to allow the adventure to proceed, but the chemistry between Banderas and Hayek’s Puss and Softpaws is clearly evident and the film doesn’t slow down long enough for it to get bogged down in its nonsensical busy work.

My kids and I had mixed reactions to Puss’s sidekick dog Perro. My daughter enjoyed him and thought he was cute, but he gave me a distinct Cousin Oliver (late addition to “The Brady Bunch” TV show) vibe as a new character shoehorned into an existing story with no real reason to exist. John Mulaney is usually a great asset to any project, managing to squeeze consistent laughs out of animated films that may sound sketchy at first (see his performance in the excellent “Chip N’ Dale: Rescue Rangers” for evidence). However Jack Horner doesn’t give him much to do except make his quips louder. He manages to get off a few laughs, mostly in his interactions with a Jiminy Cricket type conscience bug (voiced by Kevin McCann doing a pretty good Jimmy Stewart impression) who tries and fails to show Jack Horner the error of his ways.

Puss and Softpaws, Voiced by Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

The most striking difference in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is the animation The film takes cues from Japanese epics and Anime when it goes into its frequent frenetic fight scenes and this adds a fresh visual at least for these proceedings.

For decades now DreamWorks Studio has been known for formulaic animated films with absurdly overqualified celebrity voice casts and a lazy reliance on obvious jokes, and …lest we forget … dance sequences. Every now and then it would offer an uncharacteristic surprise smuggled into a long running series (see the “Penguins of Madagascar”), but “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” suggests a spark of inspiration may be taking hold in the studio.

By SPIKE WALTERS Contributor HollywoodChicago.com spike@hollywoodchicago.com