Despicable Me has its cute moments — the little doe-eyed children, the caricature-like animation style, those impish yellow minions and their squeaky little banter. But underneath this cutesy icing is a very confused cake.For starters, it’s a movie about a villain. The most obvious plot arc in a movie like this would involve this villain doing horrible, despicable crimes but eventually growing a conscience, understanding the moral implications of his actions and becoming an upstanding human being who waters his lawn, waves at the milkman and, oh I don’t know, doesn’t steal the freakin’ moon. But that’s in a better movie. This movie justifies the criminal’s crimes by having him read his (kidnapped) children bedtime stories — “Good story, dad, all is forgiven.”
We begin with Gru (Steve Carell), a round gothic thug in the mold of Uncle Fester. Gru is a supervillain. The movie is not shy about this element. Don’t go assuming there’s a caped hero that will figure into this; maybe he’s fled to a better movie. And don’t look to Gru to fill those hero shoes: he begins Despicable Me as a lecherous villain and ends it as a lecherous villain … with adopted children.How he gets these children seems to go against everything we’re taught in the first scenes: See, supervillains can take whatever they want, be it the Times Square JumboTron or the Great Pyramids. (And why would Egypt try to cover up the theft of their landmarks? It makes no sense.) This kind of thievery renders borrowing money and adopting children pretty much null and void. Yet that doesn’t prevent the film’s three writers to concoct lengthy scenes involving Gru pining for cash at the Supervillain Savings & Loan Office and adopting children. He’s a supervillain — just steal what you want, dummy!
The writers also go to great lengths to show Gru as just another member of the community even though he uses Bond weapons on the Starbucks line, his car is propelled by a Saturn V rocket booster and his house, looking creepier than Dracula’s tool shed, is clearly not HOA compliant. No one involved in this movie considered how irrational it looked to have a supervillain doing villainy in suburbia while the neighbors simply gawked in disbelief in their Izod polos.And what does Gru or any other supervillain get out of stealing the Pyramids? Or the moon? Is there some kind of ransom? Does the moon hold some larger purpose? Is it a conspiracy to disrupt surf contests? The answer to all these questions is the same: the writers didn’t want you to use your brain while watching this movie, so don’t ask. The internal logic of the film makes absolutely no sense. It’s a flawed concept that wasn’t properly flow-charted by someone who was in a position to question the logic of what happens.
So what does happen: Gru wants to steal the moon, but first he must fake-adopt the children capable of stealing a gun that shrinks things. The gun must also be used as collateral for his moon-stealing loan. He adopts the three little girls and, of course, grows attached to them even though he’s using them for his nefarious plot. The movie excuses Gru’s behavior by making the kids sweet little orphans who are being used in some equally nefarious Mary Kay-like pyramid scheme. So actually Gru’s not that bad and the kids show up to play with lasers, sleep in hollowed out bombs and disrupt his life in all the right ways. And by the end, he’s still a villain, just a villain with three kids.The movie’s animation is engaging and colorful, although the horrific 3-D darkens all those pretty colors into a soupy mud. I did love the Minions, Gru’s chatty jumpsuit-clad henchmen, who occupy every frame like little yelping gnats that are summoned by Gru’s call. And speaking of Gru, Steve Carell proves something I’ve known for a long time: major stars should stop doing character voices in animated films.
I didn’t much care for Despicable Me. It yawned out a story that made absolutely no sense, and the writers need to be taken to task over it. Will parents like it? Not nearly as much as a Pixar movie, which has more creativity in its brow sweat than this film’s entire life cycle. But will children like it? Of course, because it has a fart gun that will make your 8-year-old howl with delight.
