It’s quite natural for children to sometimes suspect that adults secretly despise them. This is why it’s an imperative to sit them down and reassure them that their suspicions have always been correct. Children are awful. They’re whiny, self-centered, perpetually sticky and can ride the rocket ship outside of K-Mart without anyone passing judgment or calling security.
Yet, as bad as real children are, fictional children are far worse. Louder and far more irritating, fictional children never fail to darken and destroy the fanciful worlds they inhabit. If you need further convincing, look no further than Scrappy Doo, Cousin Oliver and the trio of dewy-eyed orphans that ruin the gentle weirdness of “Despicable Me.”
In “Despicable Me,” Steve Carrell plays Gru, a Blofeld-esque super-villain whose career stagnates after a series of less-than-grandiose heists (such as his theft of the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower … replicas from Vegas casinos). Looking for a comeback, Gru devises a plan to shrink down the moon and steal it. Unfortunately for Gru, an obnoxious rival super-villain named Vector (Jason Segal) steals the shrink ray just as Gru was stealing it away from a trio of vaguely North Korean scientists. Down but not out, Gru exploits Vector’s love of cookies when he adopts Agnes (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith and Margo, a trio of orphaned quasi-Girl Scouts who initially serve as a diversionary tactic for Gru and eventually become his beloved daughters after an afternoon outing at an amusement park.
Before the moment that Gru’s unlikely love for his adopted daughters causes him to undergo an even more unlikely transformation, “Despicable Me” is a surprisingly enjoyable film. But that’s mainly because of Gru, who looks like a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Benito Mussolini and isn’t above using a freeze ray to jump ahead in line at Starbucks or loudly complain his way through the task of reading a children’s book (“This is garbage,” he whines). “Despicable Me” is at its best whenever it focuses on Gru’s day-to-day life in suburbia and how he deals with its petty annoyances. The film also has an incredible eye for detail and gives us a world filled with surrealistic devices such as Gru’s Germanic cookie-bots.
Unfortunately, instead of functioning as a goofy character study, the film takes the easy and admittedly more profitable way out by becoming a saccharine combination of “Three Men and a Baby” and “The Incredibles.” Alternately uninteresting and irritating, the three girls are never anything more than just walking plot devices. It also doesn’t help that the film takes a little too much time showcasing the grating antics of Gru’s minions: an army of farting, gibberish spewing blobs that are either screaming in each other’s mouths or punching each other in the testicles. Additionally, can we please limit the amount of pop-cultural references that are used in children’s movies? The scene where Gru gives his minions a Nixon-like V sign is a clever touch. The references to Lehman Brothers and “The Godfather” were not.
For what’s it worth, even though “Despicable Me” is not as entertaining or as moving as “Toy Story 3,” it’s still far better than “Shrek Forever After,” but then again, so was “Jonah Hex.”
Rating: W W 1/2
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