'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' - Movie Review

The movie starts with Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas - playing a character he first inhabited way back in "Shrek 2") having a party in his own honour and generally praising himself and otherwise showing what a self-centred prick he is. He awakes a sleeping giant, then manages to knock it out again ... but is then crushed by a church bell. And finally we get to the meat of the movie: Puss finds out that that was his eighth death, and he has only one left of his original nine lives. And Death wants him. Puss retires to a cat-lady's home in fear - evidently he was only brave because he had spare lives.

Goldi and the Three Bears come to hire Puss, but find his false grave. While there, they discuss their plan to steal the Wishing Star - Puss, overhearing them, decides to steal it for himself to get his nine lives back. Puss is joined in his adventures by Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault) and Perrito (Harvey Guillén) who aspires to be a therapy dog. Several new adversaries are introduced: Goldi (Florence Pugh), Papa Bear (Ray Winstone), Mama Bear (Olivia Colman) and Baby Bear (Samson Kayo) are most consistently entertaining.

The movie tackles the concepts of fear of death, and making a family where you are. If this were a Pixar movie, they probably could have managed to entertain the kids and really bring home their points in adult language to the parents in the room. But everything in here seems to be aimed squarely at nine year olds. I'm not saying this is wrong, just that ... it could have been done better. Not bad, but I felt like it could have been so much better ...