Gauntlet Crew's DreamWorks Canon Writeups

Genny made a separate page for the writeups so the first wouldn't look so ugly and cluttered.

#28 - Shark Tale
"While Will Smith's character is thoroughly unlikable through much of the film, his journey through this film reminds me of a bit of a reverse style Kuzco. Not as bad of a film as it's generally made out to be, it does miss some beats with giving me a hero I can root for (which they also miss the mark with for Lenny). Enjoyable enough, but still far from cream of the crop." ~Charon

"When my favorite character is a fiesty shrimp that has like 3 scenes, you know you are in for a doozy. The problem with this movie is its characters. None of them feel realistic at all and most of them are just annoying (I'm looking at you Will Smith). Very few redeeming qualities other than maybe a couple of laughs." ~Ermine

"My favorite part of the movie was the end credits.

I don't mean that sarcastically either. They saved all the best songs until after the credits started to roll. How dumb. Anyway this movie contains the worst dual protagonists I have ever had the misfortune of viewing. Oscar and Lenny are so bad I feel I can't even word it in a way that would explain my dislike of them. The movie starts off on a low note, firing off horrible fish puns one after another and these two STILL manage to make it worse. Angie, Sad Shrimp, Crazy Joe, and Don Lino manage to be likeable but they can't steer this ship in the right direction with the captain and first mate from Hell running the show.

One positive about this film? They managed to not make those kids that kept popping up totally useless. I thought they weren't going to have a point at all then right at the end bam! I even chuckled at the "we just pimped your hide" line so kudos." ~ Genny

"I think Will Smith's great but he could not save Oscar from being such an unlikable protagonist. No characters were really likable at all in this movie. Unfunny jokes and terrible animation also help make this the worst Dreamworks movie. " ~JONA

"A horrible knockoff of Finding Nemo.The unholy abomination that is the Will Smith fish will most certainly give small children horrible nightmares." ~Karo

"Painful. It was between this and Shrek 3 for most insufferable movie, but I had to just barely give it to Shrek 3. The "hip lingo" throughout the whole thing is irritating and out of place, most of the celebrity voices are distracting, and the character animation is so ugly that I actively didn't want to watch the screen when this movie was on." ~KBM

"Okay, this was so bad. I don’t even know how to make a write up for this. I didn’t laugh at a single joke, the movie would never end, it just went on and on and on. So horribly bad." ~MI

"I can safely say this movie made me consider stopping these Dreamworks shenanigans altogether, but I survived. I hope whoever decided to make the fish faces for this movie is out of a job and never hired again. Dreamworks is really guilty of trying to lure you in with celebrity and pop culture many times and the fish-faces just take it too far. They are some of the most awful character designs I have seen in anything ever. Worst of all, not only is the fish ugly, but the Will smith fish is a lazy jerk you cant root for that has a severe gambling problem. The fish faces actually distract you from the fact that you wish he'd just get eaten and the credits could go roll without you having to torture yourself on a horrible plot with nightmarish fish-faces. Easily one of the worst 3 movies I have ever seen in my life(Not worse than you Primer, dont worry)." ~Red

"The Dreamworks exec meeting went like this: "Finding Nemo was successful. Can we duplicate that?" "Sure we can! We have this project right here that we just started." "Great I want you to release what you have finished next month." That's what we got. Something that is reminiscent of some things in some other movie." ~Scarlet

"Again not as bad as I’d heard. Based on what others have said about this movie, I expected Home on the Range: Dreamworks edition. I mean… it was still bad… but it didn’t make me want to gauge my eyes out. Essentially, my bottom five Dreamworks movies are ones that I’d say are ones you should definitely skip, and this is one of them. Unless you like Will Smith being… whatever the hell that was. Because even the biggest Will Smith fans would be cringing at most of this movie." ~Starfox

"The mafia with sharks, huh? It’s not a bad idea, but it just didn’t quite do it for me. If I want to sleep with the fishes, I’ll watch De Niro in real mafia films. Also, Will Smith fish looks pretty goofy." ~Stifled

"Going into my watchthrough of Dreamworks, I didn’t have a high opinion of the company, because the general idea of the work they produce…was this. Shark Tale is a combination of everything Dreamworks does WRONG and everything people negatively attribute to Dreamworks as an animation studio. The story, while potentially interesting, was clearly trying to capitalize on the success of Finding Nemo, but instead of trying to deliver a complex and emotional story, they tried to add a bunch of pop culture bulls***, bad puns, and basically make a bright and shiny turd wrapped in pretty packaging. Except the animation looks terrible, so that didn’t work.

But even then, I feel like if you set a mafia movie undersea and call it something like “Sleeping with the Fishes”, it could have some potential and could be better than the worst Dreamworks has ever made. Instead, Dreamworks tried to capitalize on how much kids love Will Smith in movies like Men in Black (and then the terrible sequels/Wild Wild West) by having the main character be the fish equivalent of the Fresh Prince in terms of his overall mannerisms. He’s just such an unpleasant, stupid a****** in this movie. He’s just like Ariel in TLM, in that he causes everything bad that happens in the movie…but unlike Ariel, he has no justification whatsoever beyond being a greedy a******. Add to that the fact that Lola is terrible, Angie is terrible, and the mobsters are clichéd…Lenny winds up being the ONLY thing I liked about this movie." ~Vis

"Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us." ~War

"Unlikable characters, terrible jokes, and dear god every time I think of this movie that song “Car Wash” gets stuck in my head. I have no clue why I somehow own the DVD of this terribad movie." ~Wickle

#27 - Shrek 3
"A film that probably gets an unjust amount of hate, but does tarnish the name of the franchise. There are parts to this film I wish were done differently, namely the character of Charming, whom at times shows flashes of being a great villain this time around. Unfortunately between the villain takeover, Shrek/Arthur and Fiona's necessary screentime characters get lost and storylines don't get fleshed out as well as they should have been. All in all, the film is simply bloated by new cast members and lacks cohesion between the villain plot and Shrek/Arthur's father/son thing." ~Charon

"Not even Puss could save this movie holy god. Prince Charming is such an awful character and the fact that he's the main focus for the movie is just... ugh. I'm fairly certain that he's the complete reason why this movie isn't good. Thanks Charming." ~Ermine

"I think it says enough that I can acknowledge the existence of Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life but not this.

Let's pretend for one moment that a popular franchise is getting a second sequel. *spoiler* the first sequel improved on the first in every way so you have nothing but high hopes for this next one. Now, say instead of getting Revenge of the Sith or Return of the King you get Revolution. Nay, worse than the second Matrix sequel ever was. This movie not only crushes your hopes for the franchise ending on a good note, it retroactively makes you hate every character that was a part of it even if you loved them before. Now do you see why I like to pretend it never happened?" ~Genny

"Nothing more than a pathetic attempt to milk every last drop of money out of a beloved franchise." ~Karo

"I can’t make a write-up for a movie that doesn’t exist!" ~MI

"Losing all of the heart that made the first film successful, Shrek the Third tries to load itself with more fairy tale characters than a Disney unemployment line and buckles under the weight of pointless meandering in a script in search of a plot." ~Scarlet

"Shrek the Third – While I didn’t want to end my own life after watching this, it certainly was still bad. The story itself was passable, I guess. Sort of. Certain characters were very grating though, and pretty much no one new that was introduced was even close to adding any value to the film. In fact, I’d say most of them detracted from it. And weren’t anywhere close to funny. Like Merlin. Seriously, it’s not that hard to do a decent job at portraying Merlin, but they managed to f*** it up here. But the main issue was the comedy, surprisingly enough. The first two Shrek movies didn’t have the best storylines in the world, but they were hugely entertaining. But not here… the jokes were always timed awkwardly, jokes simply weren’t funny, the few that were funny were beaten to death, and the jokes that were unfunny AND beaten to death were way too much to deal with." ~ Starfox

"I love the IDEA of the Shrek series because it takes what Disney has done for years and pokes fun at it just in terms of the whole ideal of fairy tale endings. But as a franchise, it just falls flat SO often, and nowhere is this more evident than Shrek 3. I have three complaints with this movie:

First, Shrek is a series based on parodying classical fairy tales…but I think this one really missed the mark by going for references and humor on par with “Epic Movie” or “Disaster Movie” where it’s not so much cleverness as it is just making reference to stuff. The princesses kicking ass isn’t really amusing to me, and the high school scene is PAINFULLY awful.

Second, Prince Charming is a bad villain. Like, he was good as a henchman type in Shrek 2, because he had a much more solid villain to play off…but he just fails here. Like, the villain plot has potential, but he’s not a charismatic enough ring leader (especially after having been painted as a complete joke in Shrek 2).

Third, this movie didn’t even NEED a villain plot. Seriously, you have a storyline of Shrek being unsure about whether he has what it takes to handle the responsibility of running a kingdom and being a father, so he runs away from his problem. That in and of itself could’ve carried the movie, and the villain plot just feels so tacked on and forced as a result. It weakens any credibility the film had (which the awful character design didn’t already take away)." ~ Vis

"I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within." ~War

"Fiona in trouble by some distraught prince (again), Shrek must gather together a team of weird unlikely heroes (again), and Dragon is the one that ultimately defeats the main villain (again). Basically everything that was new in the movie was worse than everything that wasn’t, so you understand what I’m getting at here." ~Wickle

#26 - Bee Movie

"The movie that gave life to Seinfeld one more time after its run ended. Lighthearted and with a wacky premise, there's not much to really take away from this film. The humanxbee thing is difficult to get around and grasp, and it seemed that when the film touched upon it early it quickly spent the rest of the time dancing around the prospect of it leaving you wonder just what the hell was up with that relationship by the end." ~Charon

"This movie is just completely awkward and not good. I just couldn't get into the movie at all. The ending is awful and all of the character interactions just feel so weird and wrong. Nothing makes sense and overall its just a awkwardly bad movie. Sorry Jerry." ~Ermine

"More like Dee Movie.

First third: It's alright. Typical DW humor kind of biting off whatever Antz had going on with the little guy in a big, big world type deal... and then Barry goes to the grocery store and everything goes downhill from there. Literally the only time I laughed after this point was the fourth wall-breaking Bee Larry King gag." ~Gen

"I enjoyed the weirdness of this movie. I liked that I didn't know where the movie would end up going. I liked the over-the-top human characters. Even though the movie introduced some aspects only to drop them, I still enjoyed the oddness of it." ~JONA

"This movie is literally about bees suing the entire f***ing human race for the misuse of honey. Literally. This is about as interesting as it sounds" ~Karo

"The only positive thing I can really say about this movie, much like most of the movies lower on the list, is that it wasn't actively unpleasant to watch. Most of Dreamworks' worst is just bland - enough so that it occupies absolutely none of your thoughts ten minutes after you've finished viewing. The weird Seinfeld insect experiment is no exception. Completely boring." ~KBM

"You know, for the first 10 minutes of this movie, I thought it was easily going to hit the bottom 5 of my list. You had bee-faces, which were starting to remind me of Shark Tale, and on top of this you had "Bee" puns being thrown all over the place. I thought the "Your life is short so have an amusement park built in" was kind of neat, but for awhile it was just sitting on top of another monotonous bug life give me something different movie. Then somewhere along the lines everything gets off-track, you have Bee-Lawyers, Bee-Human relationships, the world being destroyed and Bees landing a plane. It made no sense, but it somehow wasnt horrible. It actually hit the enjoyable level at some point when I wasnt looking. Also another Dreamworks previously established marriage/relationship went down the drain." ~Red

"Living up to its name, Bee Movie is a second-rate wannabe film that shows just why Pixar sits ahead of Dreamworks at Oscar time." ~Scarlet

"Uhh… da ****?" ~Starfox

"I preface this writeup by saying the following: I hate Jerry Seinfeld. I hate his voice. I hate his personality. I hate his attitude. I hate his comedy style. I hate his lame TV show. I hate everything about him. This movie is a toned down episode of Seinfeld with bees. Hell, even some of the staff/actors from the show are involved in this movie and Seinfeld himself co-wrote it. Needless to say, by definition, I hate this movie.

I will give this movie one positive. The eventual premise actually is interesting. Bees suing humans for stealing their product? That’s a nifty idea. The economic disaster resulting from said lawsuit is also a good idea. With bee stingers being replaced by toothpicks and honey being used as an IV fluid, it’s nice to see some semblance of nature realism.

With Matthew Broderick and John Goodman on the project, surely I could forgive the fact that Seinfeld’s influence is everywhere, couldn’t I? The answer is no. Bee Larry King? A mosquito character that appears only to execute a lame mobile blood bank joke, leaves, and then executes a lawyer joke at the very end? Seinfeld Bee having a borderline relationship with a human? This is absolute garbage. And even though it’s a terrible movie, it made buckets of money on Seinfeld’s name alone. I’ll never understand why people like that chump, but what can you do? " ~Stifled

"I went into this expecting a stupid and bumbling (pardon the pun) piece of crap. And it was actually much better than my expectations. The plot starts out like Antz, with Barry not wanting to be stuck doing one job for his whole life, but then it evolves several different times, to the point where the plot that finishes up the movie is almost completely unrelated to the plot that started it. And honestly, I found that refreshing, because Dreamworks movies DO tend to follow a certain formula more often than not, and Bee Movie didn’t." ~Vis

"I have no mouth. And I must scream." ~War

"And in this corner we have beestiality. This made me learn that bees aren’t actually as scary as we want them to be, since they don’t want to use their stinger as much as we don’t want them to. That’s the high point for me. I mean, a bee suing a honey company? Definitely a low for me." ~Wickle