Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

 

 Dreamworks’ take on Puss in Boots was introduced to the world in 2004’s Shrek 2. He was born fully formed – all his trademarks were right there, in his first movie: Antonio Bandera’s raspy, honeyed Pepé-le-Pew-but-Spanish voiceover work, the rampant narcissism, the fluid swashbuckling and stiff cartwheels, and that puppy-eyes scene. Like Shrek himself, he’s a fun creation that has long outstayed his welcome, always trotting out the same tricks in increasingly tired stories and working up a flopsweat while trying make it look effortless.

 He’s been around just about twenty years now, enough to feature in three sequels, one movie of his own, and six seasons of Dreamwork’s traditionally crummy tv series. He’s earned a quieter, more contemplative movie.

 Puss in Boots – The Last Wish… is kind of what that is. As much as its studio will allow, at least. Dreamworks have always chased Pixar’s cred with parents, that elusive quality of being equally entertaining and engaging for kids and adults; But they have also always been terrified of losing the children on the way. The result is almost always a (varyingly) mature plot delivered while all the characters over-emote and manically mug at the audience in panto performances that heavily feature the “Dreamworks face” (which this movie is chock-full of) and deploy jokes and action setpieces where quantity, not quality, is prioritized.

 The Last Wish succeeds in telling a coherent story with well-integrated themes, which is great. Unfortunately it does so while doing all the things described in the paragraph above. More damningly, it’s also, to put it bluntly, pretty fucking unfunny: the ratio of gags that land is shockingly low, and there’s a heavy whiff of formula to the proceeds. Everything is played safe, with a ton of zany hijinks to help parents babysit their toddlers.

 (It's not all bad, though; a death montage is mined for easy but genuine laughs, and there's a delightful running gag with a Jiminy Cricket spoof voiced by Kevin McCann.)

 Also good: the premise. Puss has recklessly endangered himself to become a larger-than-life adventurer, but now he’s on his last life… and he’s been targeted by a seemingly invincible, unstoppable, and very effectively scary wolf (voice of Wagner Moura from the Tropa de Elite films).
 Defeated and disheartened, Puss gives up and retires to live with a cat lady.

Elite wolf

 While there, he’s embroiled in the search for a wishing star he realizes can give him back all of his spent lives and recover his mojo. So he joins up with old Flame Kitty Softpaws (ugh, that name! Voiced by Salma Hayek) and a pathologically perky mutt (Harvey Guillén) in a race against other parties out to get the star for themselves. Arrayed against team Puss: Goldilocks (Florence Pugh), the three bears (Ray Winstone! And also Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo) and the film's heavy, amoral pie entrepreneur Jack Horner (John Mulaney, the movie's most overtly Shrek-like  conceit).

 Perrito, Harvey Guillen’s character, is a good stand-in for the movie itself. On the one hand he seems algorithmically generated, the sort of character hacky movies cynically deploy to inject ‘feels’ to the proceeds. And most of his attempts at humour are pretty lame. On the other hand… well, it’s hard to deny the power of a scene where Perrito finally fulfils his goal to be a comfort dog, or when he jokes about his horrific backstory. He’s there to hit specific formula bits, but it’s done with enough skill and feeling that, depending on how much you buy into the movie, it’s forgivable.

Big Monkey Island energy here

 Predictable but enjoyable, in other words... depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing. Well crafted, even if it relies heavily on pre-fab script formulas.
 And it has a secret weapon in its art style, which is often drop-dead gorgeous. Working within the framework set out by 2018’s Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, it uses variable framerates and rendering styles -often mixed within the same scene- to generate some beautiful and visually striking setpieces. The art direction is top-notch, with some beautiful painterly backdrops and action.
 If nothing else, that alone makes it worth a watch.