Seven years have passed since a new Despicable Me film last played in cinemas; a statistic which may surprise you. It certainly did me. For the last two decades, it feels like I’ve been reviewing one of these things every other week.
Illumination Entertainment’s ongoing animated series feels inescapable in ways their rivals must be seething over. Each instalment is light, bright and daft enough to be endlessly re-watchable for under-12s, while niftily swerving every culture-war pitfall on the track. And their jabbering mascots-slash-star turns, the mischievous yellow Minions, are a brand manager’s dream: as meme-able as they are marketable, and as immediately recognisable as Coke cans.
But while the series was a primarily commercial masterstroke at first, its artistic worth has gradually been catching up. And the winning formula was finally pinned down in the 2022 prequel, The Rise of Gru, which abandoned any pretence of depth or structure in favour of smashing through dozens of manic Looney Tunes-esque skits. This latest entry perfects the recipe. It’s a dizzyingly efficient blitzkrieg of family fun, crammed with barely connected haunted house, martial arts, 007, country club and superhero-spoofing vignettes.
The plot, insofar as one exists, involves Steve Carell’s foul-tempered boffin Gru coming to terms with early fatherhood. Thanks to his new life partner, Kristen Wiig’s villain-busting special agent Lucy Wilde, a Gru Jr has been produced at some point in the murky hinterland beyond Despicable Me 3. Panic ensues when the tot is kidnapped by Gru’s old rival, Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell). But it’s no exaggeration to say that this pivotal-sounding incident, which notionally gives the film its reason to exist, is committed, worked through and resolved within around 15 minutes towards the end.
What actually confers shape on the film is a series of questions, including but not limited to the following. What would happen if the Minions caught a bus? What if supervillains went to a school that was a bit like Hogwarts? What if some of the Minions got powers like the Fantastic Four? What if an angry woman chased Lucy and her adoptive daughters round a supermarket in the style of The Terminator? What if the Minions were given unrestricted access to military hardware? What if Gru played tennis? And so on.
Each one prompts a high-energy standalone sketch, which is all but forgotten about as the film barrels onwards. Golden era Disney it is not – but the go-for-broke invention of the comedy (during one chase sequence, Gru uses his own tranquillised leg as a horse crop) is close enough in spirit to the golden era Warner Bros shorts that the handful of misses are far outshone by the hits.
I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve just been worn down. But no-one, parent or child, is coming to these in the hope of a piercing treatise on the human condition, or even a story with much emotional kick. It’s pure E numbers – 90 minutes of mad animals, disco music, violence and belching – and if a good film can be made of those things, this is what it looks like.
U cert, 94 mins. Cinemas from Friday 12th July
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