"Puss in Boots: The Last Wish": review

L to R: Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), Perrito (Harvey Guillén), and Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault)

[WARNING: spoilers.]

More emotionally compelling and way deeper than its predecessor on both a psychological and a metaphysical level, "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" is the 2022 story of Puss in Boots, a swashbuckling cat at the very end of his nine lives. This sequel to the 2011 film is co-directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado; it is another Dreamworks production set in the Shrekiverse—a pluralistic universe in which all fairytale characters exist together on an Earth that is both ours and not ours (you're not supposed to think too hard about that). The film stars the voice talents of Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek Pinault (surname-wise, things have changed since 2011), Harvey Guillén, Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, Samson Kayo, John Mulaney, Wagner Moura, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and Anthony Mendez.

Puss meets a seeming bounty hunter.

The story begins with Puss (Banderas) taking over the governor's compound and throwing a party in honor of himself. The governor (Bernardo de Paula) comes back from a trip and discovers the party. A fight ensues as the governor's guards try to capture Puss; the combat makes such a racket that it wakes the Sleeping Giant of Del Mar, whom Puss defeats. But as Puss is about to sing a victory song, he is crushed to death by the very church bell he'd used to defeat the giant. Puss wakes up in a doctor's office, and the doctor (Mendez) tells our hero that he is on his final life—the ninth of his nine lives. There will be no coming back should he get killed this time. The doctor suggests that Puss should spend his final life in peace as someone's "lap cat"; to that end, he suggests that Puss go to the residence of Mama Luna (Randolph), the local cat lady. This advice doesn't sit well with Puss and, disconsolate, he goes to a local bar to drown his sorrows in milk. An enormous, red-eyed wolf (Moura) sits next to him and reveals he knows a lot about Puss. Puss takes the wolf for a bounty hunter, and the two fight. Puss has often proclaimed that he has never been touched by a blade, but the wolf, fighting viciously with two sickles, manages the feat of opening a cut on the top of Puss's head. Puss loses his sword in the fight, and the wolf, pointing to the sword, orders Puss to pick the weapon up so they may finish the combat. Puss feels real fear as he realizes he cannot defeat his opponent and, abandoning his sword, he runs away, finding himself at Mama Luna's.

Goldilocks isn't convinced this cat is Puss.

Life at Mama Luna's turns out to be degrading for Puss. Mama Luna is a cat lady who gets targeted by the local health inspectors because she has so many cats. The cats are the regular kind, unable to talk. One animal among them, however, proves not to be a cat at all but is instead a small, goofy, cheerful dog dressed in the costume of a cat (Guillén). All the animals at Mama Luna's eat their cat food from a trough and use litter boxes that are open to the public—only a few of the many indignities that Puss must suffer. The dog wants to be friends with Puss, but Puss is having none of it. Meanwhile, the crime gang of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Pugh, Winstone, Colman, Kayo) comes hunting for Puss, unaware that Puss has buried his boots and other regalia and is in hiding at Mama Luna's. The gang finds the "grave" where Puss buried his clothing, and they tromp over to Mama Luna's, where they find Puss but fail to recognize him thanks to his scruffiness and new beard. The gang leaves, but Puss follows them and discovers they had wanted to hire Puss to help them steal a magical map that shows the path to the legendary Wishing Star—a star fallen from the heavens that grants the finder a single wish. The map, Puss learns, is stored at the fortified residence-cum-pie factory of Big Jack Horner (Mulaney), a huge and malefic collector of magical items who also wants to find the Wishing Star so he can acquire all of the world's magic for himself. Puss manages to break in and steal the map, but Kitty Softpaws (Hayek) is on the same mission, and the bear gang loudly breaks in at the same time.

The rest of the movie is essentially a race among three groups: (1) Puss, Kitty, and the dog (whom the cats call Perrito, or "little dog"); (2) Goldilocks and the Three Bears; and (3) Big Jack Horner plus his own crew, called The Baker's Dozen. The first group has the map, and it turns out that part of the map's magic is to show the user a path that reflects that person's personal anxieties. When Puss and Kitty take turns looking at the map, it shows paths full of danger; when goofy, cheerful Perrito looks at the map, however, the path shown seems pleasant and absurdly easy, so everyone agrees to follow Perrito's path. The path turns out to be more difficult than it seems at first, though: when giant flowers stand in the way of our heroes, for example, the only way through them is to follow Perrito's happy example and smell them. As the chase continues, Puss is haunted by the specter of the invulnerable wolf he'd encountered at the bar. The path itself presents temptations meant to divert the star-seekers from their goal: the bear crime family is tempted by a vision of their old residence, and Puss is tempted by visions of his past eight lives—visions that beckon him to return to his vain and arrogant ways back when he was considered a living legend.

The setup for the final showdown tempts the viewer to put on his game-theory hat in order to try to predict the outcome. Only one wish is available, according to the legend. Several people want a shot at that wish. Can the wish be shared? Kitty Softpaws declares herself ready to share her wish with Puss as they work out a major difficulty between them: Puss and Kitty were supposed to get married, but both got cold feet and failed to show up at the altar. Puss expresses regret to Kitty for his cowardice; Kitty does the same. Puss and Kitty settle their differences by the time it's time to make a wish, but Big Jack Horner wants his wish, Goldilocks wants hers, and Goldilocks's ursine family wants its wish as well. Only Perrito seems most content with not getting a wish: as far as he's concerned, being friends with Puss and Kitty is enough even if they have trouble calling him a friend.

I'm not sure the movie started that well for me. Something about the beginning felt a bit hackneyed and cliched, but with the introduction of the wolf, who turns out to be no less than the specter of death (which is why Puss is unable to defeat him), the plot kicks into a higher gear, and the stakes become much more interesting. In terms of pacing, the story moves along briskly enough, although some story beats were easy to anticipate.

Puss probably undergoes the greatest character arc, moving from a vain and brash hero-figure obsessed with his own legend and cavalier about his many lives to a humbler, less selfish person who finally values his one remaining life. Kitty has spent her years since the botched wedding hoping to find someone she could trust; she tells Puss that she also fled the wedding because she realized she could never compete with Puss's greatest love: himself. Goldilocks, meanwhile, has wanted to be with a real, human family—a fact that, when she voices the wish out loud, hurts her adopted family to the core; meanwhile, her bear family has long wanted to become a big-time crime syndicate. Puss, literally confronted with his own mortality, must learn to face death without fear—something he has never had to do before.

Religiously speaking, there are elements of Zen and Taoism in the movie's attempt to preach the doctrine of appreciating the moment. Most of this wisdom comes in the form of Perrito, this movie's version of the Taoist Uncarved Block. Perrito is a "holy fool," a figure whose seeming simplicity and naiveté mask a great profundity that shines through despite his having lived a hard life. At the same time, the movie relies on Judeo-Christian tropes to drive the plot forward: the wolf represents death, but his manner for most of the film reflects a hungry, slavering evil. European Christianity had a history of melding together the Grim Reaper and Satan. The wolf, with his demonically glowing red eyes, says he loves the smell of fear, and he obviously hungers for the chance to harvest Puss's soul—hence the dual sickles he wields, which represent the great scythe used by the skeletal Reaper we all know from tradition. It's an interesting mix of religious strands to weave together, and it all coalesces at the end in an emotionally satisfying climax whose true depth will be lost on the younger crowd, but which the grown-ups in the audience will likely catch.

The film has its share of problems, though. As I noted above, the movie starts in a cliched manner, but things do snap into place once the wolf arrives. The wolf, though, represents a theological problem: as the specter of death, he claims to be after Puss because the cat has failed to appreciate his previous lives, living his adventures haughtily and selfishly. By this reasoning, Death comes early—prematurely—for people who fail to appreciate life, which makes Death a moral force. That flies in the face of the evidence we see around us: in the real world, the bad live on to a ripe old age, getting away with earlier sins and indiscretions. The world isn't a just place except when it comes to death. And Death, as traditionally depicted, has never been karmic: he comes for us all eventually, good and bad, in an expression of amoral cosmic fairness. The magic of the map also didn't always make sense to me: the path to travel to the Wishing Star is determined by each person's subjective quirks, but once everyone settles on following one person's path (the good guys choose Perrito's path), that path becomes the objective path to follow—even for the pursuing bad guys. And while a lot of critics commented on the movie's switch to an "Into the Spider-verse" style of animation whenever there was a fight scene, I felt that that trope got old fast.

Big Jack Horner and his temporary conscience

Still, the movie is filled with clever references and visual humor. The art design is beautiful, and the voice actors all hit their marks. Antonio Banderas sounds much older now, and we have to give special mention to comedian John Mulaney as Big Jack Horner. As depicted in this story, the former Little Jack Horner of the nursery rhyme has grown up to inherit his family's pie-making empire, and in the process, Little Jack has become a hypertrophic Big Jack and developed a greedy, acquisitive spirit to the point of basically losing his soul. In preparation for his pursuit of the map, Jack takes along an enchanted satchel that can hold a warehouse's worth of magical items, one of which turns out to be a version of Jiminy Cricket that sounds as if he's doing a Jimmy Stewart impression. The cricket does his best to be positive and to suggest ethical courses of action to Jack, but Jack doesn't want to hear it, and the cricket eventually realizes that the man is a lost cause. The animators have chosen to draw Jack as having a pinched, stupid-looking face, and Mulaney provides Jack with a silly, nasal voice that emphasizes his toxically nerdy mannerisms. He's a well-realized villain.

In all, "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" is smarter and deeper than its predecessor. While not without flaws, it will pull on the heartstrings more forcefully than the previous film did. I also have to admire the complexity of the story structure, which provides us with two main antagonists (Jack and Death), but which also makes our main characters (except for Perrito) their own worst enemies. This is good screenwriting, and despite an awkward start, the rest of the story picks up steam and takes us for an entertaining ride. As a student of religious studies, I also appreciated the movie's ending, which somehow bridged the gap between Eastern and Western religious viewpoints in a clever way.