Has Gru always been a government agent?  I still haven’t seen Despicable Me 1, 2 or 3, so I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to grasping the nuances of this franchise.  I did see Minions: The Rise of Gru, where a grade school-aged Gru helped the Anti Villain League (or AVL) capture bad guys of his own free will.  Given how Despicable Me 4 shows that Gru is still in kahoots with “the man”, describing him as “despicable” is such a misnomer.  He may be irritable and occasionally get into mischief, but his heart is in the right place.  With that in mind, perhaps the time has come to give these movies a more appropriate name, like Disagreeable Me?  Or Dyspeptic Me?  Cranky but Admirable Me?  If anyone at Illumination Studios is reading this, I offer up these suggestions free of charge.  Consider it a public service.

So what is Gru (Steve Carell) up to in Despicable Me 4?  This time around, Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) of the AVL has asked Gru to help take down Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) at a reunion party held at the Lycée Pas Bon.  (It’s a school for supervillains.)  This sounded incredibly risky to me, because Gru would be outing his double life to every villain there.  And after word of Gru’s secret career as a spook got out, villains from around the world would be coming after him.  This scenario never comes up, however, which means that I thought about the plot more than the filmmakers did.  (Maybe I should have been an evil genius.  Heh.)

Unbeknownst to everyone, Maxime has harnessed the powers of cockroaches and has transformed himself into a human/roach hybrid.  His new form includes additional cockroach legs that are incredibly strong and so sharp that they can cut through metal.  (France must have the most fearsome cockroaches on the planet.)  Gru’s confrontation with Maxime almost turns deadly, but the AVL saves Gru at the last minute.  Longbottom once again thanks Gru for his service and he heads back home to his wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), three adopted daughters (Margo, Edith and Agness) and a bouncing baby boy Gru Jr.  

Gru is happy being a family man, making breakfast for the kids every morning and seeing them off to school like a domesticated Uncle Fester.  The only problem is that Gru Jr. doesn’t like his dad, a weird angle that the movie didn’t need.  Regardless, all is well and good until Ramsbottom tells Gru that Maxime has escaped.  This forces Silas to place Gru into witness protection and incorporate the Minions into the AVL.  

Dividing the plot into two “fish out of water” scenarios offers mixed results.  Silas relocates Gru and his family to the suburbs and gives Gru and his family new identities.  Gru is now “Chet”, sells solar panels, and wears pink polo shirts.  He still sounds and acts like Gru, so his new identity is a mediocre sight gag at best.  Lucy becomes Blanche and fares terribly as a hairstylist in a salon.  This entire scenario is the weakest part of the movie, primarily because there wasn’t much daylight between Gru’s family and normal people to begin with.

Fortunately, turning the Minions into AVL agents provides numerous opportunities for their trademark antics.  Silas has the brilliant idea to give five of them superpowers, and the Minions chosen for the procedure are turned into variations of several Marvel/DC superheroes.  One looks like The Thing another Mr. Fantastic and so on.  Their initial foray into the city as crime fighters goes hilariously wrong, and having the Minions become the worst superheroes ever is an idea I’d like to see explored in a future Minions-centric movie.

Back in the suburbs, Gru is ID’d by Poppy Prescott (Joey King), his neighbor’s daughter.  I didn’t understand why she was the only one who recognized Gru, a very recognizable and well-known supervillain, but whatever.  In return for her silence, Poppy blackmails Gru into staging a heist that will help her get admitted into the Lycée Pas Bon.  This welcome new course of action replaces the unfunny “Gru in Suburbia” subplot and lets Gru do what he’s good at:  stealing things.  Unfortunately, the heist results in a member of Gru’s family being kidnapped by Maxime, leading to a climactic showdown between the two nemesis.  Fortunately for Gru, he’s got the Mega Minions on his side.

Although I’m a latecomer to the Despicable Me movies, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that this franchise has outgrown Gru.  Whatever spark he gave these films seems to have died, and Steve Carell’s goofy Slovak voice isn’t enough to garner laughs by itself.  To be fair, the same can be said for the voice cast, who have little to do in the absence of genuinely funny material.  Kirsten Wiig’s performance as Gru’s wife is lackluster.  Gru’s three adopted daughters are cute but aren’t memorable either.  (I recall that one has a pet goat.)  As the main villain Maxime, Will Ferrell does a French accent and not much else.  Ferrell was once one of the funniest people on the planet; how he has been reduced to making silly voices in animated films is one of life’s mysteries.  Sofía Vergara, as Maxime’s main squeeze, delivers a couple of throaty laughs.  The amount of comedic talent wasted in this movie is staggering.

Despicable Me 4 basically treads water until the Minions appear to give us their version of The Three Stooges (or The Marx Brothers, if you’re more the highbrow type).  As vehicles for anarchy, slapstick routines and physical comedy, the Minions always deliver.  The introduction of the Mega Minions delivers most of the laughs in the movie, but the regular Minions have their moments as well.  (An inspired bit involves one being trapped in a vending machine for the length of the film.)  Even after appearing in six films, the comedic opportunities for the Minions are apparently endless.

With the way this movie turned out, I understand why Illumination Studios released two Minions-centric prequels before this one.  The Gru storyline seems to have run its course, and giving the Minions the spotlight was the right decision.  Considering the ending looks like a retirement party, I wonder if it marks Gru’s farewell from the franchise.  The movie worked whenever the Minions were around and the heist was well done, but Gru and the story surrounding him was only mildly amusing.  Despicable Me 4 is intermittently entertaining, a sign that the franchise is running on fumes.  That being said, bring on Minions 3.  Mildly Recommended.

Banana Peels

Every animated film I’ve seen had a moral to the story, even the bad ones.  (Here’s looking at you, Ruby Gillman.)  However, all I could glean from Despicable Me 4 was: don’t pretend to be something you’re not, or your children won’t respect you.  Kind of a strange lesson to impart.

You know a franchise has run out of ideas when it starts lifting them from other films.  Two examples of this were Gru Jr, a version of Jack-Jack from The Incredibles, and Maxime’s cockroach, which reminded me of Wall-E’s Earthbound pet.

Gru having the Minions act as a pit crew for Gru Jr. was clever.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only Gen-X’er who recognized Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” playing on the soundtrack while they changed his diaper.  The song is a classic but using it in this context was odd, but I suppose it would be for anyone who saw the accompanying music video too many times on MTV when they were young.

Would Gru and Maxime, supervillains in training, really have a lifelong feud over who got to perform Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” at a talent show?  I get that the use of that song is supposed to be funny because it’s incongruous, but wouldn’t something a bit more hard-edged have at least made sense?  How about “Relax”, “Sweet Dreams”, “Don’t Change” or “One Thing Leads to Another”?

Speaking of Eighties songs, the use of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” at the end of the film seemed to signal that this could be Gru’s farewell.  The accompanying cameos from villains from the previous films, which also happened in Kung Fu Panda 4, suggest that there could be a likewise changing of the guard for the franchise in the future.  I get that the voiceover work for these franchises is easy money for Steve Carrell and Jack Black, but both of them are getting on in years (61 and 54, respectively) and they might want to put their hugely successful franchises behind them.

I remembered the honey badger videos and memes going viral back in 2011.  I doubt today’s kids would understand the reference the movie is making.