"Despicable Me 4" won't win any prizes, but ifyou like this kind of thing, you'll likethisthing. Ilaughed. The dumber and more random the jokes, the harder Ilaughed. The kids I saw it with laughed harder.
Often what'sonscreen is humor no more sophisticated than a young father goofing around while putting a sock on his son's foot, pretending to missit over and over and yelling "Whoops!" each time. Gru, the reformed bad guy turned bad-guy-battler who wasintroduced in the 2010 original, is a try-hard dad-as-amateur-entertainer, muttering nervous inanities even when no actual children (or childlike minions) are around to interact with. He's the ex-supervillain as SillyDaddy, never funnier than when he's making a fool of himself on purpose or by accident.
Directed by Chris Renaud, who directed the first two entriesin the series plus "The Secret Life of Pets" movies, this one feels stitchedtogether — not in a lazy or distracted way, but in a deliberate, "We are making the kind of comedythat collects a bunch ofstuff that we find funny and binds it with wisps of plot" way. The result is hit and miss but likably irreverent overall. It's a film in the vein of a pretty goodMike Myers or Will Ferrell movie, a Peter Sellers-era Inspector Clouseau comedy (the kind where they'd spend five minutes on a slapstick karate fight), or late-period Marx Brothers, where the "boys" are pushing sixty and letting stuntmen handle most of the slapstick, but you laugh anyway because everyone involvedknows what works.
WillFerrell plays the bad guy in this one —a snooty Frenchman namedMaxime Le Mal who attended Lycée Pas Bon, Gru's alma mater (essentially Supervillain Hogwarts). Maximeblames Gru for a humiliation at the school talent show and has been stewing over it for decades. At a class reunion, Maxime(backed by his girlfriend Valentina, voiced bySofia Vergara) seeks vengeance by transforminghimself into a genetically engineered cockroach man, gets arrested and confined to a supervillain prison, then breaks out andre-teams with Valentina and an army of intelligent cockroaches in tiny Army helmets to wage war onGru, his wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) and his adorable children and kidnap the family'snew baby, Gru, Jr. (New Gru instinctivelyloathes daddy and refuses any attempt to be won over. You already knowwhere this subplot is headed.)
The movie then witness-relocates Gru and his family to a run-down house in apretentious suburb full of McMansions and assigns them backstories and preppy-sounding code names that they can't remember (supposedly Gru is a solar panel salesman and Lucy an elite hairdresser). The movieseems to be setting the stage for a "Cape Fear" riff where relentless criminals (and mayhem-inclined former criminals) wreak havoc on hypocrites and squares,only to keepMaxime and Valentina from realizing their grand planuntil fairly late in the movie. Muchtomfoolery pitting Gru against Maxime gets lost this way.
Butbroad humor compensates, including a scene where a wealthy victim of Lucy's incompetent hair care chases her through a supermarket like the T-1000 in "Terminator 2:Judgment Day"(of course they quote Brad Fiedel's score). There's alsoearly-"Simpsons" visual marginalia that sends up the blandly cheerful consumerism ofAmerican culture. The supermarket's cereal section offers Skinny Bits, Fluffy, and Atomic Sugar Bombz. Thedesignof the suburbanites skewers moderncliches of wardrobe, grooming, and plastic surgery/Botox in a manner that might make some parents feel seen, in a mortifying way. Potential recurring characters are added to the core cast, notably the teenage girl next door, Poppy Prescott (Joey King), who wants to be a supervillain and drags Gru into a half-baked scheme to steal a mascot from his former school.
There's a lot more to the film's story, such as it is. Butwhat passes for plot in the script (cowritten by Ken Daurio and Mike White, who teamed on Illumination's "Migration") is really more like actionable information, offered to the filmmakersso that a joke or a chain reaction of interlocked gags can be set up and paid off. There are times when it feels as if White and Daurio are writing less for structure's sake and more to provide the voice actors and animators with raw material that can buildto a wild sightgag with weird grace notes, as when Gru accidentally jabs himself in the leg with a hypodermic needle full of sedative, thenrides a Minion like a miniature burro while using his useless leg as a riding crop.
Othermoments are fleeting, rooted in a character's distinctive body language, andcan be savored in the way that you'd savor a detail ina live action comedy performance, like Poppy and her cat playing Dance Dance Revolution (both with the same rigid "in the zone" face), or Gru nearly getting swallowed up by Poppy's beanbag chair and thendaintily crossing his legs at the knees.
Of course the Minion army is on the slapstick case, too. They're all-in,Three Stooges style, pratfalling andpranking and slapping, drenching each other in viscous substances, chortling and babbling andgiggling.There's even a moment where anauthority figure tells a crowd of Minionsabout a dangerous experiment and asks for volunteer to step forward,and all the Minions behind the ones in the first row step back. The dinosaurs laughed atthat one.
People have an oddhabit these days of asking if a given film is "necessary." Whatever the question means, if indeedit means anything, this film is not necessary, but so defiantlyproud of its not-necessary-ness that you may end up appreciating its serene beliefin itself.Stay through the final credits and you'll get to see one of the Minions — mutated, X-Men-style, into a superhero who has a cone-shaped head and can levitate and fly — float up from the bottom of the screen, down from the top, or in from the side, thendriftaway while muttering. There were a couple of very young children in the auditorium whose families had stuck around for this. Sometimes they giggledwhen the levitating coneheadMinion was not onscreen, in anticipation ofhis return.
