Last night I did something I haven’t done in a long long time I went to watch a movie by myself. As always with me, the last minute thing meant I just rocked up at the movies and selected the title that started soonest. Unfortunately for me, I’ve already seen the only two I’m really interested in, namely 300 and Ghost Rider. So I settled on Happily Never After. Touted as being from the same producers of Shrek and Shrek 2, I happily assumed that they were basically trying to clone the success story of Shrek by producing a cookie cutter copy. Well, at least they got the clone part right I guess.
What an atrociously written story. Apart from Patrick Warburton’s great piece of voice-acting, the movie is left to wallow in the land of bad scripting, forced humour and terrible voice casting. Whoever cast Freddie Prince Jr. should be fired. His voice is just not suited to the job of voice-acting, never mind the fitting character at all. That said, the movie would have been much better off hiring far less stellar stars for the voices and rather investing more of the budget in the script writer department. The premise for the story isn’t that bad, its just the execution that lets it down so. The complexity of the storywriting/characters means this movie isn’t really right for the kids market there’s not much in it for them, but at the same time it is so poorly written that it doesn’t suit the adult market either. It basically doesn’t know what it is or what it is meant to achieve. This is probably best summed up by the fact that there were six people in the cinema for the 20:00 screening and half way through two people got up and left.
At least the movie looked nice, but to be honest, there is nothing ground breaking about that type of CG any more, basically anyone and their gran can do it by now. The soundtrack is pretty poor as well, just to add insult to injury.
To sum it up, you can safely ignore this one and wait for the Shrek 3 release, which judging by its trailer looks worth the wait. Honestly, the producers that sunk their money into this one must be kicking themselves.
