Gotta say, when Jacksfilms teased his Shrek 3 is the worst Shrek video, I was nervous, because Shrek 3 isn’t the worst. It’s not really that good of a movie by any means, but it’s quite a bit better than Shrek 4. But I’m gonna share my thoughts on the video anyway, in completely nonchronological order.
Jack starts the video off by saying that Shrek 3 is superfluous and yeah, that’s true. Arthur, Merlin and all the rest of the cast don’t feature at all in parts of Shrek 4 you’d expect them to be, so no characters are really retained and none of the events are acknowledged in 4. But then Shrek 4 is even more superfluous, thanks to the fact that most all of the film erases itself from existence after it happened. Shrek is the only character for whom something is different.
Shrek 3 at least gives us Fergus, Farkle and Felicia, and I disagree with Jack’s sentiment that you could cut out Shrek 3 and just have the baby montage in Shrek 4 and that’d be enough. I think the development Shrek goes through in 3 in order to come to terms with the idea of being a father is vital to his character in a world where he has kids, else the parenthood doesn’t really seem significant at all. Shrek 3 also established Shrek as having had an abusive father, which plays into his doubt of how good an ogre parent could truly be. It’s an interesting thing to do with the character, and one of the things I actually appreciate in Shrek 3. Remove the Shrek 3 angle, and Shrek as a father isn’t a concept we find remotely interesting.
Another of Jack’s sentiments I disagree with is the notion that using Charming as the villain was lazy, and that Rumpelstiltskin was a much better villain. I think using Charming as the villain was actually the opposite of lazy. As, well, charming as he is in Shrek 2, we don’t really get to see him do too much. Seeing himself try to take charge of his situation in 3, and actually succeed at getting the villains on his side was, again, charming. Plus, he has a lot of good comedic moments in 3. 3 expands on the character of Charming, I don’t see how it could be lazy in that aspect. Rumpelstiltskin’s not that bad, but he’s kind of just worse than every other villain. He has some funny moments here and there, and he takes the narrative in a decently interesting albeit somewhat poorly executed direction, but there’s not that much to his actual character. His motives aren’t really any more complicated than “I’m the big bad!” and while that’s true of the very first villain, Farquaad, Farquaad at least had charm and wit to him, as well as a more interesting character in general than Rumpelstiltskin ever gets.
Too many characters in 3 is a sentiment I’m mixed on. I don’t mind the princesses that much, Shrek’s always had some likeable and quirky characters that don’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things. The big bad wolf isn’t being praised for his wonderfully written character arc because he doesn’t have one, but we like him anyway. The princesses should be okay by this same logic, but then they’re all sort of… meh. Cinderella is forgettable as hell and has no personality to speak of, the joke with Sleeping Beauty got old fast, and Rapunzel is hard to care for too. Her betraying the rest of the gang to be with Charming wasn’t an interesting angle for either character, and kind of detracts from the otherwise all great Charming in this movie. Snow White is the only one I really liked because she was sassy and I liked her style, but she still pales in comparison to the likes of Pinocchio or Gingy.
Arthur is… an interesting character. I don’t really think he himself is all that interesting or funny, and he honestly doesn’t provide Shrek with much development either, even if the narrative tries to make it look like he did. And yet, Arthur takes on such a prominent role in the movie. The thing about Arthur is that he plays into the aforementioned superfluous nature of this film. The film would change if you removed him, yeah, because he’s supposed to become King of Far Far Away in place of Shrek, but he still manages to feel inconsequential, perhaps because he’s never acknowledged outside of this film. Arthur’s kinda just forgettable, and the way the narrative shifts around him, and his two scenes of large public speeches, they feel just feel unnatural, failing to be heartwarming like they’re so obviously supposed to be.
I liked Merlin though, he was a funny take on the actual character of Merlin and he had some of the best lines in the film, lines which Shrek provided even funnier replies to. So I can appreciate Merlin in that regard.
So yeah, Shrek 3’s characters aren’t the best, but they’re leagues above Shrek 4’s. As I mentioned before, Rumpelstiltskin isn’t all that great, but he’s not the only one. One of the main opposing threats in Shrek 4 is the Pied Piper, who has absolutely no character to speak of and no charm or likeable aspects either. All of the ogres in the Resistance are the most forgettable characters in the franchise, even Gwen, the high school girl that Arthur had a crush on in Shrek 3, is more memorable than these bastards.
The main draw in Shrek 4 is that because of the alternate universe setting, we can see characters we know and love taken in entirely new directions, but this concept is woefully underutilised.
Donkey isn’t different. At all. His personality and character are the exact same, with the only difference being that he’s weirded out by the fact that Shrek knows him, even though he sees Shrek as a stranger. But that’s not character, that’s just what’s to be expected of this setting.
Puss is pretty bad too. He’s also the same character but he’s a little more lax and a lot more fat. That’s it. His new personality is that he’s sort of mellow.
Fiona is the only character for whom they actually try something with in this alternate universe concept, because her personality in this new setting is actually different. Fiona effectively got sick of waiting to be rescued and escaped from the tower herself and, sick of the discrimination she faces in her ogre form and that ogres all over face in general, she takes on the role of leader of the Resistance. But this huge leadership role isn’t really great for her character. Fiona is bossy and commanding, sure, but not an expert military tactician. We know she’s a fighter, and Shrek 3 demonstrates that she can even be a fairly strategic one at that, but large scale military operations? There isn’t enough going on that really indicates she’d be so capable. Even if we are to believe that she was that capable though, it doesn’t really mean anything anyway. All of these ogres are so impossibly hard to care for that Fiona’s efforts are hard to care for just by extension. We see these nameless ogres being used as literal slaves at one point, but we don’t feel sorry for them, we just don’t care. Farquaad saying “it’s hideous” in reference to Shrek is a line that feels more discriminatory than literal slavery, all because Shrek 1 actually made us care about our ogres. Plus, the dynamic between Shrek and Resistance!Fiona doesn’t really work at all, especially compared to the relationship that Shrek develops with the real Fiona in Shrek 1. She’s just too drastically different for it to work, and their relationship isn’t really developed in a natural and believable way. When Resistance!Fiona falls in love with Shrek, it doesn’t make us as an audience feel happy that we’re getting closer to the true timeline, it just feels shallow and uninteresting, lazy even.
But still, even with Fiona being a pretty different and cool in concept albeit worse than the original character version of herself in this setting, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s literally a “what if?” scenario. When the movie ends with Shrek returning to his original timeline, the real Fiona hasn’t changed – she’s had literally no development this entire film. Nobody other than Shrek has, and I’m mixed on his development, though I’d need to rewatch 4 to comment more on that particular topic.
Also, 4’s so full of weird little details that I don’t really understand. Fiona’s parents sign away Far Far Away to Rumpelstiltskin so that Fiona’s curse is broken, meaning Rumpelstiltskin gets the kingdom. Expectantly enough, the kingdom turns to shit, but then, the degree to which it turns to shit just seems unrealistic. The world in Shrek 4 is less like The Elder Scrolls and more like Fallout, and I really don’t get how it got that bad. Shrek’s swamp is a dead tree in a dead wood that’s in completely flat terrain. The swamp shouldn’t look great obviously, Shrek was never there to really turn it into a home, but how did the entire wood die out? There are other unanswered questions too. How did Rumpelstiltskin’s witches manage to capture Dragon? Why does Rumpelstiltskin command these witches anyway? How can Rumpelstiltskin’s contracts fuck with the spacetime continuum? What’s with the fucking ear trumpet thing? Why the fuck did they genuinely pull the “rearrange the big letters in the contract and make some origami to show a new contract” thing? It wasn’t a new contract, for the record, but you know. I could go on, but I’ve been at this for over an hour and a half and I think you get the point.
Jacksfilms stated in his video that Shrek 3 is garbage and should be stricken from Shrek canon, a notion I mostly disagree with. Jacksfilms stated in his video that Shrek 4 is an underrated classic, a notion I disagree with even more than the first statement. I know that Jack’s a comedian obviously, and the video was full of jokes, but as he made clear in his daily vlog series on jackisanerd, this video actually has some truth to it. This video has joking aspects, but it’s clear enough that his opinions are legitimate. And I think they’re wrong.
TL;DR Shrek 3 > Shrek 4 and Jacksfilms is an idiot.