Bovie Movie

Even an overused and under-funny Mike Myers can’t salvage this flight-attendant comedy that never leaves the terminal, let alone gets off the ground. It’s not entirely the film’s fault — with several comedy sequences reportedly axed in deference to increased sensitivity about airline security post-9/11, it was never likely to take flight. Still, it’s hard to see what first attracted Myers and top-billed Gwyneth Paltrow to this mediocre tale of a small-town stewardess who wants to fly high with a major airline. Mercifully short, the film traces her training under Myers’s tutelage, plus her run-in with a cabin rival. 

Dr Seuss’s much-loved children’s book gets turned into ineffective big-screen mush in this colourful but lifeless adaptation. Learning no lessons from Ron Howard’s delightful The Grinch, production designer-turned-director Bo Welch makes scant use of Seuss’s wonderful rhymes and pacing, instead delivering a horribly self-aware vehicle for Mike Myers’s ego. There’s little magic or charm here as youngsters Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin find a rainy day at home lifted by the mysterious appearance of a giant talking feline. Though the kids are great and the CGI fish hugely entertaining, Myers’s fun-obsessed Cat is just plain annoying — his performance merely an amalgamation of every other comic character he’s ever played. Consequently, no matter how hard debut director Welch tries with the imaginative visuals, most scenes fall flat when Myers is on screen. The creation of a romantic subplot to flesh out the original story, featuring Kelly Preston and a grotesque Alec Baldwin, is jarring and unnecessary too. A wasted opportunity. 

The first two Shrek movies were packed with fairy-tale send-ups and warm humanity, and proved an absolute delight for young and old alike. The third outing shows signs of franchise fatigue as it struggles with a half-baked storyline in which the grumpy green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) goes in search of a young King Arthur as heir to the throne of Far Far Away. The breathtakingly innovative wit of the earlier films may be lacking, yet there’s still plenty here to enjoy, from Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas’s manic double act as Donkey and Puss-in-Boots to some sly, “Once upon a time” in-jokes. But in keeping with the film’s less certain direction, entertaining scenes of adorably cheeky baby ogres are upstaged by a blandly mirthless human teenager in Artie (Justin Timberlake), who appears to have been brainstormed by marketing department suits eager to extend their audience demographics. 

If you liked the International Man of Mystery’s first adventure, then you’ll love this shagadelic sequel, in which Austin Powers (Mike Myers) goes back to the 1960s to reclaim his “mojo”, which has been stolen by his nemesis Dr Evil (also played by Myers). While the star and his returning director, Jay Roach, revisit the same free-for-all secret-agent spoofing of the original, they do it with just the right degree of retro style, knowing geniality and complete lack of taste and restraint. Heather Graham is an adequate replacement for Elizabeth Hurley as Powers’s mini-skirted sidekick, and the result is a lava-lamp lampoon as stupid and (for Powers fans) as sophisticated as the first psychedelic excursion. 

This welcome follow-up is every bit as cute, clever and funny as the original — if less of a surprise, as we expect its technical brilliance this time and are perhaps less dazzled by it. The sequel picks up after the marriage of Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz), and follows their trip to her homeland of Far Far Away. If Fiona’s parents, King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews), are shocked to discover she’s an ogre, that’s nothing compared to Harold’s reaction to her new husband. The king wants Fiona to marry the foppish Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), so he hires assassin Puss-in-Boots (marvellously voiced by Antonio Banderas) to kill his new son-in-law. The parodies, pop references, Disney-baiting and Hollywood send-ups (the kingdom of Far Far Away is etched as a medieval Tinseltown) are hilarious — as is Eddie Murphy, who’s on great form as Donkey — and there’s plenty of subtle satire and double entendres for young and old alike to savour. 

This animated fantasy comedy from DreamWorks is an irreverent, occasionally scatological fairy tale with state-of-the-art computer-generated images that almost steal a march on Toy Story. Shrek is an ugly, antisocial green ogre (voiced in a variable Scottish accent by Mike Myers), who must rescue a human princess (Cameron Diaz) in order to appease evil Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) and rid his swamp of an infestation of traditional fairy-tale characters: three little pigs, a Pinocchio-style character and so on (the disrespectful treatment that they receive suggests a sly dig at Disney orthodoxy). The animators achieve a startling level of reality (grass, leaves, dirt and fur are particularly lifelike), but it’s the characters that carry what is an incredibly slight beauty-and-the-beast story. The only problem, and it’s very minor, is the degree to which Eddie Murphy’s Donkey — a partly-improvised vocal turn to match Robin Williams’s in Aladdin — steals the film. Children will love it, while adults can enjoy the action-movie homages and Disney-mocking.