I watched Despicable Me 4, which is actually the sixth Despicable Me movie (wow!), and, true to form, it was another Gru movie, full of the same basic things that all the other movies had.
And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
While Disney movies tend to ignore classic story writing techniques and cram their product with social messaging (either subtly or not so subtly), Illumination does the opposite. It plays things safe, making a PG movie that pushes no boundaries, contains nothing remotely near the edges of the continuum of what is socially acceptable for children, and contains no social messaging that wasn’t already present in 1985. It uses the most basic screenwriting formulae to deliver a predictable movie that, despite its conventionality, is more entertaining and satisfying than most of what Hollywood does these days.
It turns out that executing the basics well produces a decent product.
The setting ought to be familiar to everyone after six movies, and the movie spends very little time on exposition for anything other than the main conflicts of the movie. In typical fashion, there are three stories of descending importance and screen time (along with a fourth small conflict), and all of them come together to solve or progress the main conflict or “A” story:
A: Gru is being targeted by an old schoolmate named Maxime, who has transformed himself into a giant cockroach (played by Will Ferrel using a French accent), and Gru must hide from him. They go into the equivalent of witness protection while Maxime plans to kidnap Gru’s baby boy.
B: The new next-door neighbor girl (a new schoolmate of Margo) wants to be a supervillain and blackmails Gru into helping her steal a honey badger from Gru’s old school. Inadvertently, this ends up providing Gru’s location to Maxime, but she makes up for this by helping Gru to get back his son.
C: The Minions are now employed by the Anti-Villain League, which turns some of them into superheroes. The Mega-Minions are terrible at their job and retire, only to be activated to help Gru in the final act.
D: Gru’s baby does not really like him. Of course, the baby decides in the final act he does love his father and helps him to defeat Maxime. Problem solved.
All of this stuff goes as you would expect. There are small conflicts along the way (Lucy failing as a hairdresser, the girls being sad about moving, the girls doing karate, Gru trying to make friends), but these are mostly joke scenes hung on the tree of the main conflict like ornaments. They aren’t really resolved and don’t need to be because they are there for comedy.
All the jokes are what you would expect. There is slapstick targeted toward children and a few jokes for adults to laugh at. There are plenty of jokes that don’t land and silly moments that fall flat, but there is enough comedy to pull the whole thing along, enough jokes that you don’t feel that awful embarrassment from a failed joke for very long. Reference humor was also present despite it being 2024, and there was even a Terminator 2 parody scene—bizarre.
My big complaint is that there is too much packed into the movie so that none of the conflicts have sufficient screen time to be developed and breathe on their own. I blame the Minions for this, as their story is superfluous to the prime plot; they only exist for comedy, and while I can’t blame the producers for putting them in the movie (being an essential part of audience expectations), the price paid in screen time is more development of the human characters and missed opportunities for more jokes. Gru trying to lay low has always been a funny idea, even from the first movie, but this is rushed through, as is the conflict with his adopted children. Lucy has no real growth or opportunity to solve a problem. She’s just there.
This is unavoidable with long-running series. Characters are added with each sequel, and they need screen time. Audience expectations shift to certain kinds of scenes and humor, and they must be included. It becomes impossible to do things as well as the first movie because there are too many demands on what the movie needs to be, and this includes a tight runtime. Every villain from every movie gets a cameo at the end, and even Doctor Nefario shows up in the final scene to hand-wave away a major problem (Gru Junior was turned into a cockroach baby). The movie isn’t terrible, but given the setup, it’s easy to see that it wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been had things with the story just been able to be a bit looser.
On the one hand, it’s corporate slop. On the other, it’s well-executed corporate slop that, bucking the current trend, gives the people what they want. It’s actually refreshing to see a formulaic, family-friendly comedy in 2024, which is a strange sign of the times.
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