Antonio Banderas can carry a film with his voice alone, and for the length of a dance fight in a cat cantina he does. Around him Chris Miller’s spin-off piles heist on heist until the charm wears thin, but it stays likeable.
Seven years after the cat first drew his sword in Shrek 2, DreamWorks gives him a film of his own and sensibly keeps the ogre out of it. Chris Miller directs; Tom Wheeler’s screenplay sets Puss (Antonio Banderas) loose in a fairytale Spain of whitewashed towns and dusty plazas and asks him to hold the screen for 90 minutes without help. He nearly does. Puss in Boots is a good-natured, handsome swashbuckler with one scene we would gladly watch again and a plot that keeps getting in its own way.
The voice is the film. Banderas plays Puss as a cat who believes every word of his own legend, and the joke is how small he is and how little that troubles him. He orders a glass of milk the way other men order a duel. The animators give him the enormous wet-eyed stare that got laughs in the Shrek films and then, wisely, ration it. Salma Hayek’s Kitty Softpaws is the sharper of the pair, a thief who works alone and is not impressed by anyone, and Hayek plays her with a dryness the script does not always deserve.
Their first meeting, in a cantina full of cats, turns into a dance fight, and it is the best thing here. The two circle each other in flamenco steps, Puss stamps, Kitty spins, a guitar is involved, and the whole thing is settled without a sword being drawn. Henry Jackman scores it with Spanish guitar and handclaps and lets the rhythm do the choreography. We laughed out loud, and then noticed we were watching two animated cats dance a tango at each other and found we did not mind at all.
Zach Galifianakis voices Humpty Alexander Dumpty, the friend Puss grew up with at the orphanage in San Ricardo, where Imelda (Constance Marie) raised them both. Humpty is where the film is braver than it needs to be. He is needy, clever, wounded and not entirely to be trusted, and Galifianakis gives him a voice that wants to be liked more than it wants to be good. A flashback to the two of them as children, an egg and a kitten plotting under a blanket to find the magic beans, is unexpectedly sad, and we were moved more than we had any right to be by an egg.
Guillaume Aretos designs the world as a sun-bleached Spain, orange roofs and blue shadows and a town square where the fountain is the only cool thing in sight. Gil Zimmerman’s camera swoops and dives like a camera on a crane, and the film was plainly built for 3D: watched flat, you can still see the depth it was reaching for in every cliff that falls away and every beanstalk that climbs into cloud. Isis Mussenden keeps Puss in hat, cape and boots and Kitty in a mask, and that is all anyone needs. Erika Dapkewicz cuts the chases fast and clean, so that even when we did not care what the chase was for, we always knew where everyone was.
The trouble is the story. Wheeler, Brian Lynch and William Davies stack the deck: magic beans guarded by Jack (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jill (Amy Sedaris), a married pair of outlaws drawn as hulking brutes with a soft spot for babies; a plan to steal the beans; a beanstalk; a goose. Each reel adds a heist on top of the last one and the backstory keeps stopping the present to explain itself. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, and the last twenty minutes become a large, loud chase through a town, the kind the Shrek films used to end on when the jokes had run out. By then we had stopped laughing and were waiting for the cat to do the eyes again.
Against the first two Shrek films it is lighter in wit and gentler in intent, and it is a good deal better than the fourth. It does not sneer at fairytales; it plays dressing-up with them. Banderas spent two films as Zorro and wears this costume as if he had never taken it off, and the film is wise enough to let him.
It carries a U and runs 90 minutes, with nothing the children will notice as filler and enough for most critics. It will not change anyone’s week. Put it on for the dance, stay for the egg, and let the beanstalk take care of itself.
