“What's impressive?! I've been a boy this whole time!”
(Spoilers for Puss in Boots 2: The Last Wish)
Big Jack Horner was delightfully wretched and felt a lot like he was a Shrek villain stuck in a Puss in Boots movie and it made for a really interesting contrast, with everyone else in the forest going through swashbuckling adventures of personal growth and companionship, while he’s cheating and steamrolling his way through everything with darkly comedic brutality, quite literally pulling Shrek gags out of a bag as he just kills and burns and stomps his way through the magical wonderland.
It’s like he was designed to be the Final Boss of Shrek, except there’s currently no Shrek movies for him to be in so, into the Puss in Boots sequel he goes, almost like this dark embodiment of the shadow cast over the Puss in Boots franchise that it must surpass (and somehow did). He just does not play by any of the same rules everyone else does and it’s great, it lets everyone look better by default. It lets the Puss vs Death story play out in all it’s poetic glory but still gives the movie a proper bastard for everyone to gang up on. I didn’t think of that at first, but I’ve read some comments and wonderful analysis commenting on Jack Horner as a extended pisstake on Disney, an update of Lord Farquaad for modern times, and it’s an analysis that makes a lot of sense.
In that regard: while this couldn’t possibly have been intentional given their release dates so close to each other, I do think it’s pretty funny that Jack winds up connected to Pinocchio, a character who had having a rather busy 2022 if you can tell. Not only is he followed around by a bootleg Jiminy Cricket, but we see that Jack, who was extremely well-off and spoiled throughout his entire life, bears an incandescent bitterness against all magical creatures (and Pinocchio specifically) for taking attention away from his roadside show, which consisted entirely of him reciting his nursery rhyme over and over (even his family was shown bored by it), and so that’s why he wants to own ALL the magic in the world: so that nobody else gets any.
He, who already owns a massive empire and business and land and literally endless collections of powerful magical artifacts he can use to achieve anything he wants a trillion times over, who doesn’t even know what most of what he has does or is worth, is driven by the fact that Pinocchio upstaged him once,
and so nobody else should get to do anything like that ever again.
(Again, not saying this was remotely intentional, just a funny coincidence)
Also wonderful how his ultimate undoing comes from said bootleg Jiminy Cricket, one of the countless employees he’d abused and crushed over the movie, finally having enough and sending him his incendiary “resignation letter”. 2022 saw the year end with a movie where Jiminy Cricket ends a titanic corporate manchild’s reign of terror and life by setting a magical contract map on fire and freeing everyone from it.
It doesn’t even register as one of the best things about the movie only because the movie has SO many best things going on, that it can just casually work in one of the funniest Shrek subplots of all time like it’s easy. Still shocked at how good this film was and how much life they injected into it, perfect movie to end or start the year with.
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