Monster mush.

The first Shrek movie kicked off to the strains of Smash Mouth's "All Star," the worst hit song of 1999; Shrek the Third, the latest and lousiest installment in the saga, includes a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" performed by Fergie, a pillow-lipped chanteuse best known for her chart-topping single "My Humps," and perhaps for the humps themselves. Smash Mouth is more or less forgotten nowadays, and within five years I expect that Fergie will be as well. If there's any justice, by then the Shrek phenomenon will have joined them in the pop-culture dustbin, remembered only for being as rancid and calculated as anything foisted on the American family in recent memory.

If every culture gets the fairy tale it deserves, though, Shrek may be with us for a while yet. The story of the ogre who wins the beautiful princess (who turns out to be an ogre) gets laughs by upending fairy-tale convention--monsters are heroes; Prince Charming is a preening SOB; damsels-in-distress turn out to know kung fu--but it isn't a Monty-Pythonesque parody of the genre, tongue firmly planted in cheek throughout. Rather, it's a straightforward revision with comic flourishes, designed to flatter the prejudices of what a recent study suggests may be the most narcissistic generation of Americans in history, by imparting a moral--be thyself--that's as old as Polonius and as new as The Secret, and as brainless as both.

Traditional fairy tales are usually about turning into someone else, about the power of transformation in human life, for good and ill. So princes become frogs and swans and beasts and then princes again; maidens pass from life into sleeping death and back; youngest sons prove themselves worthy of kingdoms and despised serving girls make their way to royal balls. And the transformations these tales depict are demanded of their audience as well: A great fairy story initiates a child into the mysteries of adulthood, shadowing its enchanted landscapes with intimations of sexuality and mortality; adults, meanwhile, are tugged back toward childhood and the sense of wonder that comes with it, before habit and care made the remarkable fact of existence seem commonplace. As G. K. Chesterton once put it, "These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Walt Disney's adaptations tamed and commercialized the fairy tale, but wisely left this essential dynamic intact. The Shrek movies, by contrast, turn it on its head: They offer something to adults and kids alike, but instead of introducing children to mature themes and reminding grown-ups of childhood's advantages, they leave both the way they found them and encourage the worst tendencies of each. Just as Shrek's ogre hero is celebrated for staying exactly as he is--ugly, smelly, clumsy, and uncouth--so the audience is flattered rather than challenged at every opportunity. The kids get slapstick, wisecracking animals, and potty humor, because, hey, that's all that kids are capable of appreciating; the parents get pop-culture shout-outs and the occasional smirking innuendo, the better to make them feel smarter and more knowing than their children. In the latest installment, this means a projectile-vomiting baby ogre and a gingerbread man who defecates frosting, for younger viewers; the adults, meanwhile, are served up Merlin as a hippie self-help guru, a bra-burning Snow White, and the land of Far Far Away as a medieval Beverly Hills, its streets lined with shops like Ye Olde Foot Locker and Abercrombie and Witch.

What's most depressing is how much effort has gone into the whole dreary mess. It's rotten with cynicism but floated on a cloud of Hollywood lucre, and filled with the desperate clutter of a franchise that exists only to keep its studio executives in massages and Maseratis. Shrek the Third rounds up a cavalcade of comic voices, wasting everyone from Antonio Banderas to John Cleese on a frantic, pointless plot that involves Shrek (Mike Myers, who still sounds like he's doing Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies) trying to pass off the throne of Far Far Away to the wimpy, teenaged Artie Pendragon (Justin Timberlake), while coping with the anxieties of looming fatherhood and fending off an attempted coup d'etat by the Rupert Everett-voiced Prince Charming. This story, such as it is, is credited to seven (!) people; there's a soundtrack stuffed, for no good reason, with the Ramones, Led Zeppelin, and Macy Gray; and the whole thing is done in lavish, no-expense-spared animation, with a palette that's almost rich enough to make up for the fact that the human characters look like refugees from a high-end video game, all clean lines and inexpressive faces.

No doubt it will be enormously successful. The billions the Shrek films have raked in thus far prove Mencken's famous claim that nobody ever went broke underestimating the American people--but then we knew that already. What they really prove is that the best way to exploit American stupidity is to flatter American intelligence, and give moviegoers something that's just clever enough to make them feel smarter than the average schmo, or the average fairy tale. Thus the "Versarchery" store in Far Far Away, or the "Just Say Nay" program at Artie Pendragon's high school, or Snow White's catty remark about Rapunzel's hair extensions: all of them "in" jokes that don't really leave anyone out. Except the kids, of course, who are stuck with the projectile vomiting and the treacly esteem-building, and who, if they're unlucky, may come away convinced that this is all that fairy tales have to offer--noisy, garish, moralizing entertainment that cuts the heart out of wonder.