Netflix Movie of the Day: Shrek is so good we’ll almost forgive Mike Myers’ truly terrible Scottish accent
Movie of the day
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After what feels like about thirty sequels, it’s sometimes easy to forget about the original Shrek film was a breath of fresh air – well, as fresh as you’d find in a swamp. It provided a template on which all kinds of animation have been based, with its mix of delightfully crude jokes for the kids, edgier jokes for the adults, and a completely irreverent attitude that got it in trouble in a certain film studio and with a certain theme. park provider.
Even a year later, it’s still a very funny movie for viewers of all ages. It’s so good, in fact, that your writer, a born and bred Scot, is willing to overlook Mike Myers’ terrible attempt at a Scottish accent.
Is Shrek worth streaming?
It is. Myers’ grumpy swamp dweller is a great comedic character, Eddie Murphy as his constantly chattering sidekick Donkey is just on the right side of extremely annoying, and Cameron Diaz is enchanting as Princess Fiona, a royal woman who keeps a very big secret. It’s packed with almost as many jokes as one Aeroplane! film and there is a very sweet message about self-acceptance that is conveyed quite well without spoiling the over-the-top fun. And it has a lot of fun mocking fairytale tropes, which it does mercilessly. If Bitchmedia says: “Turning the fairy tale genre on its head was a clever, if not entirely new, idea at the time, and Shrek twenty years later it still retains much of its ironic charm.”
Total movie said that “there’s no denying that the monster-as-hero device has about 90 minutes of entertainment mileage, and the portrayal of the story’s moral is handled well enough to avoid tweeness”. And the Radio times said: “This animated fantasy comedy from DreamWorks is an irreverent, sometimes scatological fairytale with cutting-edge, computer-generated visuals that almost steal a march ToyStory.”
Writing in Britain Daily telegram, novelist Andrew O’Hagan said, “Here’s a film of its time, funny, enjoyable, spot-on looking and wholly original in a way that might make us reexamine the meaning of the word.” And Andrew Walker of the London Evening Standard said that “Shrek lives, and with dark, devious, and absolutely hilarious irreverence, he satirizes every once-sacred feature of the child kingdom. “The film is” a subversive joy.