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From Martin
Jacobs (Fiery Fergus).
For those of you who enjoyed Shrek 1, we have privileged inside information on the sequel. Shrek 1 was an entertaining feature with some genuinely hilarious moments and not a few barbs thrown the way of the antiseptic middle American Disney culture. Many of the gags appealed to the five-year olds (how Shrek and Fiona improvised with a snake and a frog to make party balloons), but there was enough to keep their parents interest (the fight scene borrowed from The Matrix/ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
Shrek 2 continues on the same theme, but budgetary cut-backs have meant that Shrek's donkey assistant (Eddie Murphy) has long since eloped with the dragon, and Shrek's voice (Mike Myers) is now supplied by the
Scottish copper from "The Bill". The story line centres on Shrek's daughter (Nikki Webster), who was to be called "Feck" until someone noticed the resemblance to a common Irish expletive (which should not to be confused with the much ruder "u" version). She is approached by Wendy, a refugee elephant, who needs help to rescue her home town from the tyrannical reign of Dambo, an old elephant with no voice, impossibly large ears and a reputation for flying over his enemies and spraying them with peanuts. Dambo's motives stem from his abused and exploited childhood and the absence of a father figure in his formative years, and his dictatorship has been propped up by an army of sycophantic mice, who have since bred to plague proportions.
Feck's only hope is to penetrate Dambo's castle, and reveal him as a fraud who can no longer fly because he has grown obese from the diet of fast food and coke lavishly supplied by his sponsors. This she does by hitching a ride on a lassie dog, who is sadly misguided into believing that it can be re-united with its master by leaping the 10 metre spiked palisade of Dambo's stronghold.
As it turns out, Wendy simply wants to usurp Dambo so that she can monopolize the home market with her own brand of fast food, and the moral of the story is that honesty and courage are poor substitutes for cunning and guile.
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