I'll admit I enjoyed the first Shrek when it came out, and I hadn't watched it in many years. I put all my movies from my DVDs on my PS3 for when I travel, and one evening after watching Shaun of the Dead, Shrek came on (alphabetically). I just let it play and watched for old times sake.
Yeach.
Shrek is a sterling example of why its a bad idea to write a movie stringing together nothing but pop culture references. Its a whopping 11 years old and it is so incredibly dated its awkward and painful to sit though. And the sequels were bad when they came out so I can't imagine how they would play now.
I kinda liked the first one in spite of all the fucking Smash Mouth just because parts of it sorta reminded me of the old Fractured Fairy Tales that used to rerun when I was wee. By the time I rented and watched Shrek 2, my more cynical brain ruined it for me by pointing out how seamlessly every line of dialogue in the movie with the word "ogre" could be edited to read "nigger" instead. Then I realized that was the real joke the writers were aiming for, turned off the DVD, and sat down to a hard drink and another quiet, self-ruined evening.