Bringing Big Jack Horner Down to Size: A Review of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Bret van den Brink

With it being over a decade since the first Puss in Boots film, which in itself was a mere spin-off in the Shrek franchise, one may be forgiven for asking, upon hearing about its sequel, “What’s the use?” Nonetheless, the dandy in me would probably quip a quote from Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is quite useless.” The wisest part of me—reverent and patient—would be inclined to experience the piece first and judge it after.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, directed by Joel Crawford, is much more than a mere sequel. It is not an unartistic cash-grab seeking to pickpocket its audience members by exploiting their nostalgias, nor is it a work, which, being overshadowed by the covering cherub (to borrow an idea from Harold Bloom) of its predecessor, is unable to achieve a new greatness. Its art style is, at many points, sumptuous, and there were many times I would have paused just to admire the flowers in the background, were it not for my friends watching with me. (And that was before stopping to smell the roses was a major plot point.) The voice acting was lively, giving the film a sense of variety, ranging from its feline spaniards to its cockney bears (with Olivia Colman being versatile as ever). And the sound consistently evoked a pathos appropriate for its given scene—the hair-raising whistling of Death was particularly evocative. If that was not enough, the story is even neatly tied together, in true fairy-tale fashion, with a moral: be grateful for the good things in your life. Even if you are an orphaned pup whose family tried to drown you in a sock.

The antithesis to the film’s message is embodied in its villain, Big Jack Horner who turns to villainy despite growing up with “loving parents, stability, a mansion, and a thriving baked goods enterprise to inherit,” scorning them all as (pardon the vulgarity) “useless crap.” This fiend suffers, like Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, from a “sense of injured merit.” Some may object to the grand comparison, but, as C.S. Lewis correctly observes in A Preface to Paradise Lost, “Only those will fully understand it who see that it might have been a comic poem.” The film, in its way, enacts the comedy the epic might have been. Big Jack Horner’s fall from grace, however, was not spurred by God’s preference for his Son over Satan, but by a crowd’s preference for Pinocchio over himself. One pictures him saying in some indeterminate point in his past, with Milton’s Satan, “Evil be thou my good,” that he might strive for greater power.

John Coltrane died in 1967 at the age of 41.

He was a seminal figure in the history of jazz, forever moulding its image in an undeniable way. Yet Giant Steps was not Coltrane’s most popular album. A Love Supreme found its audience in a way that none of his other albums did. The album tells the story of Coltrane’s life in a way that reaches directly into the human soul and spirit. It captures a feeling that most of us could never express, much less make clear through a saxophone. It is sad, it is joyful, and it is so very human.

Your wish is horrible. YOU’RE horrible! You’re an irredeemable monster!” Big Jack Horner responds, “What took you so long, idiot?!”

Big Jack Horner is evil, plain and simple, and he acknowledges that. In an era suspicious of binary oppositions such as good and evil, preferring to emphasize complexity and nuance, sometimes to the point of moral obscuration and obfuscation, it is refreshing to have a character who is unambiguously evil. All this emotionally immature, Napoleon-complexed monster cares about is world domination—to teach the world a lesson for ignoring him as a (loved, wealthy) child—and to this end, he collects magical items as a means of accruing power. There is an elegance to simplicity which is often undervalued. (Of course, the real world is one of nuance, and art should also reflect this.)

Evil surely has become Big Jack Horner’s good. After the Ethical Bug—his Jiminy-Cricket-inspired conscience—says, having attempted to reform him time and time again, “Oh. Oh! That was horrible.

Do I have qualms about the film? Yes, but my reservations are few. I particularly wished to see Big Jack Horner’s story come full circle by him being brought down to size (to Little Jack Horner) by consuming the Drink Me potion from Alice in Wonderland (which, if memory serves, is shown prominently three times in the film). Secondly, I wished to see the movie’s two major allusions to Pinocchio more fully developed. Is Big Jack Horner the anti-Pinocchio, who, defying his arthropodal advisor to his story’s close, ends up not a real boy but a dead boy? Perhaps—it is the Ethical Bug who delivers Big Jack Horner his comeuppance by withholding the final piece of the map—but it seems to me that this very engaging film squandered some of its potential.