Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)

A tiny cricket walks into a therapy session, opens its mouth, and becomes the best character in any animated film I've seen in years. That's the genuine, unironic thesis of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and I'll stand by it. Two minutes of screen time, maximum flamboyance, pitch-perfect comic delivery, and I was absolutely floored. I laughed harder at that little bug than I did at most full-length comedies last year. If you've already seen this film, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, just trust me on this one.

Right, now that I've got the cricket appreciation out of the way, let's talk about the rest of the film, because it genuinely earns its place alongside that standout moment far more often than I expected going in.

What surprised me most here is how sincerely dark it's willing to go. Mortality, the fear of death, the psychological weight of having burned through eight of your nine lives through sheer reckless ego, these aren't just flavour. They're the actual engine of the story. Puss grappling with the fact that he is, for the first time, genuinely mortal and genuinely frightened is handled with more honesty than I'd have thought possible from a film spinning out of the Shrek universe. There's a sequence involving the villain, a wolf who embodies death itself, that is legitimately unsettling. Not nightmare fuel exactly, but the kind of thing that makes you sit up a bit straighter in your seat. Good animated films earn those moments. This one does.

The animation is where it really pulls away from its predecessor. The fairy tale forest sequences and the Wishing Star set pieces look genuinely gorgeous, drawing on a storybook illustration style that feels considered and deliberate rather than just a technical flex. I was reminded, watching some of the more stylised action, of the ambition you see in something like Josep, where the visual language is doing real storytelling work rather than just dressing things up. It's not quite at that level of artistic intention, but the impulse is similar and worth acknowledging.

Antonio Banderas, meanwhile, purrs his way through every scene with the kind of effortless charm that makes you wonder why anyone else ever voices this character. There's a warmth to his performance that keeps Puss likeable even when the script is pointing out what a self-absorbed disaster he's been for most of his nine lives. You root for him. That matters.

But here's where I have to be honest about the mixed feelings, because they're real. Outside of the cricket and a handful of genuinely clever gags, the film plays it fairly safe. The bones are familiar Shrek-verse stuff, found family dynamics, a quest structure, sidekick comedy, and while it wraps them in a slightly darker, edgier package, it doesn't quite shake free of the formula. The pacing sags a little in the middle act, some of the supporting characters get shortchanged, and there are moments where you can feel the film pulling its punches when it had the nerve to go further.

So it's good, no question. A genuine step up from the first film. It has heart, it has craft, and it has a cricket that I will be thinking about for the rest of my natural life. But groundbreaking? Not quite. It finds the edge of something genuinely special and then, more often than not, steps back from it.

Three and a half stars.

Any film that makes me laugh that hard at an insect deserves every one of them.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-07-22

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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