Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is the long-delayed sequel to the original 2011 film, and follows, of course, Puss, losing his eighth life and learning that he has only one left. However, there is a myth out there that is called the “Last Wish,” and can grant any one wish to whoever finds it, so Puss embarks on a quest to find it with some unlikely friends. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one trying to find it either, as both Goldilocks and her group of bears, as well as Jack Horner, want it as well. Oh yeah, and there is a bounty hunter wolf by the name of Death who will do anything he can to make sure that Puss loses his last life and doesn’t get the wish he wants.

Before I watched this movie, I have to be honest, I didn’t really know much about it other than the animation was amazing, and it absolutely was. You can tell that it is taking inspiration from Into the Spider-Verse, with a very similar look, as well as all the low frame rate stuff, and it looked pretty incredible. It’s not just ripping off Spider-Verse, though, as it definitely has its own unique look to it, kind of going for more of a paint-like look rather than a comic book one.

The main villain, who is kind of more in the background to be honest, named Death, was honestly one of the coolest villains I’ve seen in a film in a while. His opening scene completely establishes that he means business, and he’s surprisingly intimidating and scary for a kids' movie. Unfortunately, I found him to be severely underused over the course of the runtime, so much so to where I questioned if it was either him or Jack Horner who was actually the main villain. I’m surprised he’s even been talked about over film discourse so much since he probably gets like maybe seven minutes (that’s just a random estimate) of screentime in total. This was by far the most disappointing thing to me about Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and a bigger part of the reason why, well, I gave it such a low score.

I also really wasn’t jiving with the humor much at all. I liked all the dark comedy, so to speak, but everything else felt incredibly childlike and kind of dumb to me. I was really hoping, and honestly expecting going in, that this film would have a similar tone akin to the Spider-Verse movies, but it was so much more kiddy. It was really weird, too, because there were certainly elements, such as the dark humor, but also Death, and actually some language that made for a really weird mix of tones in my opinion.

The story was way too simplistic, too, and I had a really hard time getting into it. It doesn’t really get much more complex than the premise itself, and the whole journey to find the Last Wish just felt so generic and, honestly, lame to me. I get that this is a PG-rated movie, but since I’ve already mentioned them, look at the Spider-Verse films, for example (or really just Into the Spider-Verse since it was the only film that was out at the time of The Last Wish’s release). Yes, their stories aren’t exactly complex, but there are so many more layers to them, mainly with the themes, that make them a lot more compelling. I found that this Puss in Boots movie severely lacked any of that.

With the underusage of Death, I was also severely underwhelmed by the other two main villains, Jack Horner and Goldilocks. Goldilocks isn’t really as much of a villain as Jack Horner, but they essentially serve the same purpose in the story: to make Puss’s quest more complicated, so I’m putting them in the same section. Goldilocks definitely has more of a compelling (on paper) motivation to get the Last Wish than Jack Horner, but to be honest, I don’t think that came across on screen very well at all. I still thought she was a very selfish, and dare I say, an annoying character that I wish hadn’t been in the movie at all. Speaking of selfish characters that I wish hadn’t been in the movie, Jack Horner absolutely comes at the top of that list. The more that I think about it, and the more I write this review, I actually feel like he kind of was the main villain of the movie, and I really didn’t like him. He was simply just obnoxious and gave the film even more of a childish feel than it already had.

I wasn’t into the film at all by the third act, but to be honest, there was a really cool showdown at the end that I thought might have just redeemed the film for me, even a tad bit, but it ended up not doing that. It ends in the most anticlimactic and unsatisfying way imaginable, and I was honestly shocked by how unearned the ending felt, at least to me. It was one of those endings that was sort of surprising, the way it concluded, but not in a good way at all.

Maybe I set my expectations the wrong way, but I went into Puss in Boots: The Last Wish expecting Spider-Verse maturity, but instead got a film that felt way more targeted to kids to me.