Puss in Boots predictable, full of puns, little comedy

There is something perfectly infectious about Antonio Banderas’s voice. There. I said it. It, therefore, makes perfect sense for the debonair Spaniard to play swashbuckling romantic adventurers like Zorro. Now, he gets to use his suave voice to play the feline version of that swashbuckler, Puss in Boots, in full cartoon caricaturish regalia.

A full hour-and-a-half of his voice, however, is just a bit too much. Every sentence I utter now comes out sounding like a romance novel with too much drama. “Now, I must get some bread and cheese,” I say as I enter the grocery store, “for if I do not, the picnic will be ruined!”

But I digress…

Puss, at it turns out, is every bit the cad that you’d expect, even if the vision is nowhere near where Charles Perrault originally defined him back in the late 17th century. Then called Le MaĂ®tre Chat, he was a devilish rogue who lied, cheated and stole in order to get rich, powerful and famous and to marry a princess.

Our modern Puss is really just an outlaw desperado trying to clear his name after unwittingly getting involved in some poorly executed bank heist. He grew up in an orphanage with Humpty Alexander Dumpty (voiced by Zach Galifianakis). That good egg spent his boyhood yearning for the lucre of the golden eggs laid by the goose at the top of the beanstalk sprouted by magic beans.

When he gave up trying to find the right beans, he turned into a bad egg and decided to go straight for the bank vault and steal the precious metal from the townsfolk of San Ricardo. He also tricked Puss into being an accomplice. While Humpty was incarcerated, Puss escaped but earned the scorn and enmity of all.

Puss gets a chance at nabbing the real beans from the villainous couple Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris), an action intended to earn his chance at repaying the bank and restoring his honour. Before he can accomplish this endeavour, he is sideswiped by Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), a sneaky pickpocket with comparable skills in the martial arts. Her blade is fast but her thieving hands are faster.

As it turns out, she is in cahoots with the egghead mastermind himself, Humpty. His devious plan is to get Puss and Kitty to collaborate on the crime of the century, and help share in the wealth with all of San Ricardo.

And so we find ourselves once again in the land of magical fairy tale creatures. This spinoff isn’t quite as strangely populated as the first four Shrek movies, but our protagonist intermingles with the egghead, Jack and Jill and surprise guest appearances by Mother Goose and Jack (of beanstalk fame). Everybody else is human and oddly unsurprised that cats talk, wear boots, swordfight and have dance-offs. They probably deal with their incredulousness by constant punnery and mirth-making. Yes, cats drink cream, cough up hairballs and have nine lives. We know.

And therein lies the main problem with Puss in Boots: the writing. Apart from the brilliant original Shrek, all of the sequels were tired exercises in character and plot development. This one is no different. Telling the back-story of Puss before he ever meets up with the green ogre et al had some great ideas and tie-ins to children’s literature. So how did it end up to be so boring? This 90-minute movie feels like a two-hour epic. That’s a bad sign for anything, especially something that’s meant to capture the imaginations of young children and their parents alike.

Not that it was all bad, mind you. There were some laughs, some great cinematic moments and even a twist or two. I enjoyed the brief flourishes of spaghetti western cinematography and the general tone. For the most part, Puss in Boots didn’t land on its feet.